The best books about impossible childhoods

Jane Eyre is a book I read and teach at least once a year. Its early section about childhood is, for me, the archetype of all impossible childhoods. Jane is orphaned, misunderstood, oppressed by the awful relatives who take her in, and abused by officials of Lowood School, the institution they palm her off on. Deprivation and hunger are the daily facts of her life. Humiliation, physical “punishment,” and the threat of hell are used to control her fellow wards. She is not so easily controlled. She watches while some of her fellow children, including her beloved friend Helen Burns, die because of infections caused by unhygienic conditions and malnutrition.

Despite it all, she retains an authenticity, a sense of herself that she refuses to violate to curry favor or reduce the harshness of her treatment. She remains a truth-teller, a natural detector of the pompous and hypocritical. She questions orthodoxy, she questions the Patriarchy, she questions class, she questions the limitations placed on women. Her refusal to conform and her propensity to ask hard questions, make her one of my favorite children in literature.  

In this classic text, racism and its attendant poverty work in tandem to smother young Richard’s development. This book begins with one of the most memorable scenes in all of literature: Richard almost sets his grandmother’s house on fire because he is just so curious about what would happen if flames met his dying grandmother’s curtains. A truth-teller like Jane Eyre, Richard refuses to accept the status quo as unchangeable – refuses to identify himself with the way society identifies him. Though nearly every act of his self-assertion is met by a counteract of suppression on the part of the adults around him, who are either preparing him to live in a racist world dominated by a white ruling class, or a part of that white ruling class, he questions everything. He calls out race as a social construction even as a child; he rails against the injustice of some people having enough to eat while others don’t; and at turning points where another person might decide to act merely out of self-preservation, he enlarges his vision of himself and strives to bring justice to the world.

Robert Goolrick does not pretend in this memoir to have overcome or prevailed or found redemption from his horrendous childhood. Instead, he tells us the number of psychotropic prescriptions he must take every day just to be able to function. Something unthinkably awful happens in his seemingly genteel family at the hands of the father who is supposed to protect him, and as a result, he will never be the same. When he tries to tell what happened and seek comfort, let alone redress, his whole family turns on him. Yet Goolrick tells this story with an amazing lyricism and compassion. He unravels his tale slowly, protecting and preparing the reader in a way that no one in his family ever protected or prepared him. 

Nothing ruins a childhood so much as a parent with a secret. Alison’s father is a closeted gay man who sublimates unmet desires via the “monomaniacal restoration” of their old Gothic Revival house into a kind of look-but-don’t-touch museum. His M.O. is artifice, while young Alison becomes a relentless seeker of honesty. Soon after she comes out to her parents as a lesbian, her father finally tells her haltingly some of the secrets about his own sexuality. Shortly after that, he dies, in what may have been a suicide, and she feels culpable. In richly drawn panels full of irony and layers of meaning, and text that could stand on its own even without illustration, Alison finds her way towards truth. 

This essay collection is not strictly about Jo Jo’s childhood but the pieces like “Bulldozing the Baby,” that are, are indelible. Some might argue that her childhood is not all that impossible, nothing that horrendous happens. The most tragic event for the narrator is when she accidentally damages her doll Hal, a prized transitional object, and her aunt responds by throwing him into the trash. And yet, from the perspective of the toddler JoJo, it feels tragic. Her grief is as deep as any adult’s. If the piece shows us anything, it is that the feelings of childhood are to be taken seriously. Other than that, her father drinks too much, and there is an emotional mismatch between mother and daughter. They don’t understand each other, and not having a parent who sees who you are, even if you grow up relatively privileged – not beaten, not starved, not materially deprived – can be a kind of tragedy for a child.

This book leaves me feeling that childhood, no matter how easy, is an inherently impossible state. Jo Jo’s own thoughts, feelings, sensitivity to everything going on around her is too much for her young self to comfortably contain or for anyone else around her to handle. And she can’t even tell them what is wrong. Reading The Boys of My Youth may get you back in touch with even the pre-verbal you, the inconsolable infant you, the you that it took JoAnn Beard to find words for.