Book #77: The Girl from Yamhill

Title: A Girl from Yamhill
Author: Beverly Cleary

Beverly Cleary's story of childhood through high school graduation demonstrates how memoir, as a genre, has changed (and improved!) over the last twenty years. The book, published in 1988, is a fairly straightforward story, beginning with her parents' courtship and extending through her birth in 1916, her early years at a family farm in Oregon, and extending through a lonely childhood as the only child of distant, unhappy parents in Portland. The story is highly chronological, and only tangentially about writing-- she talks about how she always wanted to be a writer and specifically took classes like typing and journalism in high school in order to further that aim, but since the book focuses on her childhood years, she's not doing much actual writing. It's also appears that if Cleary took inspiration for her stories from real-life experience, it would be from the lives of her children, and not from her own childhood, which was quite solitary.

What struck me most about A Girl from Yamhill is not Cleary's childhood or her frustrating and meddlesome mother (who would have been truly awful to grow up with) but how the quality of memoirs has really improved since this book was written. The 1988 Publisher's Weekly review of the book says, "It's bootless to compare and contrast autobiographical books, since each memorists' experiences and those they select to share are unique," but today we would absolutely compare and contrast autobiographical works, both for what experiences they choose to select, and they way that authors chose to share those experiences.