An American Childhood

This part begins when Dillard is 15 years old and describes her rage-fueled adolescence. She begins the section with the biography of the great steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie, and his impact on the city of Pittsburgh. For example, Dillard attended an art school, for four years, in one of the museums founded by Carnegie.

The elite Scotch-Irish social stratum in which she is being raised becomes a superficial, hypocritical prison to Dillard. She longs for deep and real feelings to replace the surface glitter and glib small talk of her companions. Dillard describes the rigid lives of the women, raising their children at home alone while the equally entrapped men work for the money to keep the whole enterprise afloat. She sees her world, in its desperate finery, reproducing itself generation after generation.

Her last visit to see her grandmother, Oma, in Pompano Beach, Florida occurs when Dillard is 15 years old. She bird-watches and takes advantage of the beach, but everything she is asked to do either enrages or bores her.

Her adolescent outrage hits its peak when she is 16 years old; she becomes wild and unpredictable, even to herself. At times, she feels demented. She blames her parents for the wrongs and injustices of American society.

She quits the church after writing a long, angry letter to the pastor outlining the elements of her outrage. Her mother and father believe that she is deliberately trying to humiliate them, along with her sisters. She meets with the pastor and asks the eternal question: why is there so much suffering if God is a loving entity? He loans her books that do not answer her question.

Dillard is involved in a drag race that ends with a crash and her hospitalization; she also ends up in juvenile court. However, even this event does not cool her rage. Next, she is suspended from school for smoking cigarettes. Her whole family is devastated; even 6-year-old Molly cries. Her parents do not know what to do with her. She does not know what to do with herself; even the French poets she now adores, especially Rimbaud, offer her no answers. She spends a lot of time thinking about her boyfriend.

When she discovers Emerson’s essays, Dillard finds a kindred soul that speaks to her. In his philosophy, particularly in Emerson’s concept of the oversoul—a united humanity within spirit form—she finds a truth denied by religion and other metaphysical writers.

To drain off excess energy, Dillard begins drawing again in earnest. She doodles on every surface she can find. These drawings, coming to Dillard unbidden, are often grotesque exaggerations of people’s faces.

Dillard is set to attend Hollins College in Virginia the next year. It is a beautiful place, and Dillard allows this decision to be made by the headmistress of her school and her parents. The headmistress says that this college will help smooth Dillard’s rough edges; Dillard professes that she wants to keep her rough edges because they may help her cut a hole through to the real world.