100 books like That Unearthly Valley

Edna O’Brien’s 2012 autobiography Country Girl is a blunt, gripping, lyrical and non-self-pitying depiction of her early life in the west of Ireland. It exposes the stultifying conformity imposed by the Catholic Church, family and community which I experienced myself. She rebelled as she sought freedom and self-expression from a domineering mother and drunken father. Edna’s escape to Dublin, London and New York as well as her exile from Ireland reflects an individual addicted to drugs and alcohol who seeks acknowledgement, liberty and success through many failed relationships. Edna’s autobiography resonates with many of my own experiences of the 1960’s. Country Girl demonstrates how one Irish female writer broke the cultural silence so that others would not feel alone. Her writing was an inspiration to me for my own memoir.

In 1899, the Irish novelist, Hannah Lynch wrote her memoir Autobiography of a Child. She caused controversy in Ireland and abroad by attempting to represent her childhood up to the age of twelve narrated through the child’s voice, a strategy I adopted but from the ageing child’s point of view where the language and thought process become more complex as I grow older. Her use of adult reflection upon the child’s unstable memory demonstrates an original understanding of the child’s point of view and its representation. Hannah uncovered the inescapable cycle of harsh treatment by her parents within a large family and the physical abuse by nuns at school. Her book reinforces the unreliability of memory for autobiography and helped me to accept that total veracity is not possible.

John McGahern’s Memoir is a chronological narrative of his experiences in County Leitrim Ireland from the age of three. His continuous prose of detailed descriptions of places, people, and incidents combined with the child’s voice create a brutal home and school environment from which his only escape is the beauty of the local landscape. His contrasting depiction of his brutal father and loving mother resurrects my parents’ behaviour. He uses the most effective order of words to create a gripping narrative to represent Irish family silence. John’s precise style creates an addictive tension hooking me to every word where I am left to ponder on what is not said. John’s narration of his experiences encouraged me to partially adopt his approach in my own memoir.

Hugo Hamilton’s 2003 autobiography The Speckled People recounts his Dublin childhood experiences of being brought up by a brutal, Gaelic-speaking and nationalist father who forbade him from speaking English and a German mother who escaped from Nazi Germany. 

Hugo’s linguistic difficulties and cultural disparities restricted his personal development where confusion and frustration led to isolation. I am fascinated by his search for self-identity through his love of English resulting in a thought-provoking narrative that reflects the powerful role of language in the representation of the self and identity formation. I can vouch for this in my own memoir where the increasing complexity of language of the ageing child highlights the stages of my linguistic and cognitive development.

Children of the 17th and 18th centuries were raised far more strictly than today. In the 17th century, initially without schools, they would likely be uneducated. Encouraged to walk as soon as possible, children would be incorporated into the work of the family at an early age, to ensure the survival of the community. Alice Morse Earl conducted years of research, based on letters, official records, diaries, and other accounts to create and detailed portrait of a child’s world of that time. For me, it answered questions, such as: Did the children work? How were they educated? How did parents teach respect, manners, and religion? How were children disciplined? Were children allowed to play and what toys or games did they have? I found her book to be enormously helpful in creating the life of Mary Allerton as a child in the Plymouth Colony and the home life of the… show more.

Another book about youthful innocence and optimism.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is the story of Laurie Lee leaving England in 1935 on a boat for Spain with just a violin and a blanket and few possessions.

He busks his way around Spain heading south to Andalucía, playing in cafes and town squares for a few coins.

Life in Spain was poor and primitive and the country was on the verge of civil war but his cheery demeanour was always met with warmth and humanity. It’s a life-affirming story.

Celebrated author and Stanford professor Tobias Wolff recounts his perilous teenage years in the 1950s Pacific Northwest. Clever, conniving Toby (self-named Jack Wolff) will do whatever it takes to reinvent himself in a memoir full of larger-than-life characters, thrilling events, emotional rollercoasters of betrayals, broken dreams, and hard-won triumphs, all conveyed in prose so lucid that the book has been college assigned for its poetic honesty at the sentence level for decades. Guaranteed you’ll be floored by what it takes for Wolff to ultimately transcend the merciless circumstances of his life. 

I love this novel for its ability to describe a very small world as if it were the most important place in the universe. It captures perfectly the way in which people, visited by enormous tragedy, are able to reconstruct lives that are full of richness and humor. 

There are many reasons to love this book, and the subtitle says it all. This book is A History, A Story, And A Memory Of The Last Plains Frontier.

That last frontier was an arid, desolate corner of southwestern Saskatchewan where his American parents tried homesteading between 1914 and 1920 when Stegner was a child. The family returned to the U.S., but Stegner re-visited this land of his youth in the early 1950s and wrote one of the best accounts of the last frontier in the North American West.   

I believe this book serves as a solid foundation for the scholarly discussions surrounding the changing paradigms of childhood throughout history and the world. I find its examinations of many different times and places fascinating. This volume explores the cultural creation of concepts of childhood and the ways they have developed and evolved as the world has become more connected, something I can relate to my own childhood experiences.