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• #Best memoires Patch#

His father died when Crews was twenty-one months old, struck down in his sleep by a heart attack so sudden that it did not wake his wife or their two sons, with whom he was sharing a bed. No, they were important because a large family was the only thing a man could be sure of having.”Ĭrews’s own family was a source of mystery and torment.

“Families were important then,” Crews writes, “and they were important not because the children were useful in the fields to break corn and hoe cotton and drop potato vines in wet weather or help with hog butchering and all the rest of it. His parents, Ray and Myrtice, were tenant farmers, and they moved from one plot to another, surrounded by neighbors engaged in the same near-subsistence existence, each family possessed of so few belongings that everything they owned could be inventoried in just a couple of sentences.

#Best memoires Patch#

The title’s colon balances two improbabilities: that the events in the book really did occur in a single person’s early life, and that those events, far from extraordinary for their time or setting, represent a common experience, shared by kin and community.Ĭrews was born in 1935, in the county seat of Alma, some two hundred miles south of Atlanta, not too far north of the Okefenokee Swamp, in a one-room house that his father, using crosscut saws, wedges, mallets, and axes, built on a patch of land that had to be cleared of pine trees, palmetto thickets, and gallberry bushes. The childhood recorded in its pages unfolds in the thirties and forties, and the place it brings to life is Bacon County, Georgia. “A Childhood: The Biography of a Place,” first published in 1978, has just been reissued as a Penguin Classic. The memoir’s title alone merits a small eternity’s worth of consideration. The memoir that he crafted in the face of that rejection answers some specific questions, namely where its author came from and how he became a writer, but it asks broader ones, too: why anyone becomes anything, how we square our pasts with our futures, and why certain things-a book, its author-are rescued from oblivion. Crews was a decade into his career, with six novels to his name, when his publisher rejected an autobiographical manuscript that he submitted. His novels-including “The Hawk Is Dying,” which is his best known, and “A Feast of Snakes,” which is his best-were flawed, but the memoir is flawless, one of the finest ever written by an American. But Crews wrote about what he knew, not as endorsement or even by way of explanation-it was simply the wellspring for his writing.įorsaken regions and forgotten subcultures were Crews’s material. There’s so much brawling, drinking, domestic abuse, disease, mutilation, racist talk, racial violence, rape, sociopathy, and womanizing in his work that no algorithm could design an author more certain to fail the Bechdel test, the DuVernay test, the Vito Russo test, and any other test to which art is subjected these days. We often wonder why a writer fades from prominence, but with Crews it’s easy to chart the course to his obscurity.