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Ebenezer
Oct. 9, 2007
A Girl From Yamhill
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that more than the street names in the Ramona Quimby books came directly from Beverly Cleary's childhood. She, too, stomped around on coffee-can stilts calling people "Pieface" and played brick factory, I learned the first volume of her memoirs, A Girl from Yamhill. But I can't help being a little disappointed that now I'll be thinking of Depression-era Cleary instead of timeless Ramona when I reread the books with my children.
Yamhill is written in the same clear prose Cleary uses in her other books, in which she's not afraid to throw in some challenging vocabulary for children. But this surely is not a book for children. It goes beyond Ramona-age and even Beezus-age into the teen years, where we discover that people were not really more innocent then; things just weren't identified or talked about much. There's a relative who preys on children. There's a frighteningly overbearing boyfriend. And while Cleary doesn't come out and say it, her mother clearly suffered from depression.
I'm curious about why I liked the book. I'm not one who enjoys lurid celebrity stories. And the way Cleary addresses the difficulties of her upbringing wasn't really gripping or exciting. But it felt as if I was having a conversation with someone I knew, or was getting to know. At the same time, I felt a little as if she was trying to explain some shortcomings she sees in herself by pointing the finger at others. Most of the time, I sided with Cleary, having felt some of the same dynamic in relationship with my own mother. But once in a while I felt as if she was trying too hard to deflect attention from her own immaturity at the time.
I'm looking forward to reading the second volume, My Own Two Feet, to see whether that tendency shifts as the Cleary she's writing about grows into adulthood.
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