The Overrated Annie Dillard

By Isabella Warren

I have reached a cessation at the attempt to read any more of Annie Dillard’s work. While she is regarded as one of the best in modern day narrative prose writing, having won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974, her writing, dare I say, is not for me. I have had An American Childhood on my bookshelf for the past three years, unable to make it past the first 50 pages. I also have Teaching a Stone to Talk, collecting dust on my bookshelf, only ten pages read. I keep telling myself that others have put her next to Joan Didion, Maya Angelou, writers that have prose that actively fill my mind of wonder. I keep telling myself that because of this, my world will be open with even more awes and woes, a spectacular feeling of filling my continuous mind with lyrical words if I opened my heart to Annie Dillard’s writing. But I am telling myself this all to fit into a narrative to like writers that others say are profound. 

Now, in our society, I think many of us are caught up in agreeing with the masses: reading what the masses are reading and watching, liking something because it’s popular. It is like a herd mentality that if someone is standing in a chosen line, well then more people will come and choose that line, rather than going in an empty one. This goes with books, writers that are popular. We flock to those people, say Annie Dillard, not because we understand her writing but because others have put her in a light where her writing is suggested to be transformative to one’s world with her reflections. But for me, I never saw that in her work. For me I saw a bunch more work to understand a multitude of words that could have been put into simpler sentences for an easier read. For example, in An American Childhood, Dillard writes, “The interior life is often stupid. Its egoism blinds it and deafens it…It fancies that the western wind blows on the Self, and leaves fall at the feet of the Self for a reason…” In lamer terms, our inner thoughts are often shortsighted as many are only interested in themselves that a small gesture of a leaf falling in front of one is a gesture that was meant for that one person in particular, and no one else. Personally, it took a long time for me to understand what she meant: leaving me with this quote stuck in my head as I continued to blindly read about Dillard’s childhood, still hung up on the underlying meaning of the “interior life”. Whereas with, say, Maya Angelou, she leaves a profound impact with her words immediately after reading them. For me, the reader, I find that I am left with her words still in my heart that I am able to add more value to her words after. Angelou writes, “To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision.” Angelou is able to describe the feeling of being young in a way that provides the reader with a quick understanding of that feeling, the ecstasy of being free but how that can be a threatening feeling as a child. 

While An American Childhood is an adult reflection on one’s childhood, something that stuck out to me in the first chapter was Dillard’s awareness as a five-year-old. “The men had driven away and the schoolchildren had paraded out of sight. Now a self-conscious and stricken silence overtook the neighborhood, overtook our white corner house and myself inside. “Am I living?”… I watched the unselfconscious trees… I forgot myself, and sank into dim and watery oblivion.”

While I was also not a normal child, I was not consciously thinking about if I was alive or not, falling slowly into an oblivion of losing myself. Maybe looking back as an adult, she realized that is what she was doing or thinking but I find it to be a little inauthentic about the way Dillard describes her thoughts and consciousness at such a young age. 

Annie Dillard’s writing has an underlying philosophical tendency and maybe that is the beauty in her work, that one must take time to interpret her words, chew thoroughly, taste every note; like one does with a philosophy book, it is up to interpretation. But then surely it would take me longer to read her book on her American childhood.