Study guide for "An American childhood" of Anne Dillard?

Question

I'm an English learner. I'm having trouble of understanding this book. Because it has too many metaphors. Can anyone help me finding a study guide for this book. I think it's kinda hard to find one because it's a non-fiction book.
Thanks for ur answer. Really appreciate it!

Answer 1

Well. I did find this. Please go to the second link for the rest of the chapter summaries. For the full thread, which has more information that might help, please use the third link.

Prologue:
Talks a lot about the geography and the wildnerness and history of the settlements on the East Coast of the United States. Mentions Benjamin Franklin, and relates Franklin's Philidelphia to the Pittsburgh she grows up in somehow...

Chapter 1: Talks about when she was Ten, how her father read "Life on the Mississippi" over and over, it was his favorite novel. First time mentioning of how her father takes a boat trip from Pittsburgh down the river on the Allegheny river. He quits the firm he was working for, and old family firm, and goes to adventure down the river. Breif mention of New Orleans' culture, how its the source of Dixieland Jazz, the music her dad loved. Talks about the history of Annie's Dad, identified as Frank Doak. (See page 8 for a good description of this character). Random instances mentioned of people jumping off of a bridge into the Allegheny River, committing suicide. These attempts were the talk of the town.
Nevertheless...After going down teh river and a really long description of his travels, Frank Doak decides he doesn't really like living on the river, adn he wants to go home, he misses his family. He has responsibilities. He turns around and comes home. Annie metaphorically or somehow other, mentions skins for the first time on pages 11-12... look into this if you're looking for good quotes.

Chapter 2: Anne's Childhood, starting at age 5. "Every morning the neighborhoods emptied, and all vital activity, it seemed, set forth for parts unknown." (Dillard, 15). The neighborhoods would become empty when everyone went to go about on their days, and Annie recalls how the Catholic schoolchildren behaved and went in a rush to their jail of a Catholic school, St. Bedes. Talks about how after the war, everyone wanted to settle down in a nice suburban area, includes more history of all the great things her father did, but upon mentioning the role of the females, it says this: "Every woman stayed alone in her house in those days, like a coin in a safe." Basically, this whole chapter is random fragmented memories of being five years old, and wondering "Am I living?". Reasoning skills begin to develop in the child's mind, and she thinks that the 'lay-on your-back-and-look-at-clouds-while-thinking-about-what-they-look-like-game' is pointless.

Chapter 3: When Annie was five, she couldn't go to sleep because she imagined a monster in her bedroom. She envied how her sister could sleep peacefully all night, while she imagined a scary beast made of shadows flying across her room. Later, when she reasons enough, and becomes a smarter and more mature little human being, she realizes it was just the light from passing cars outside her window at night. She realizes there is a world outside her house that exists, and more to explore.

Chapter 4: The chapter that randomly begins talking about skin. This is linked to the earlier mentioning of skin in a previous chapter (see above chapters). The child feels beauty in the way their skin is, and Annie notices that young skin, that youth, is more beautiful than old skin, like her parents' and grandparents'. She begins experimenting by playing with the knuckle skin on her mother's fingers. She starts noticing different parts of the body, for instance, at the beach she felt her parents' shinbones. She notices hair on her father's arms and legs and tugs at it and he says "Ouch! Enough of that." Annie admires how youthful her parents are compared to other adults. She admires her mother's vanity. Annie would watch her parents get ready for an evening out and admired them through all of it.

Chapter 5: A big snow happens in 1950. An Irish Catholic schoolgirl named Jo Ann Sheehy skates on the street at night, and Annie and her parents admire it's beauty, the girl skating in the dark under street lamps, never falling down. However, they do not like the Sheehys, because Jo Ann's brother Tommy told Annie Dillard to go to her maid and tell her she's a ******. Watching Jo Ann Sheehy skate at night seemed to be the winter evenings' entertainment for many years.

Chapter 6: More information about the Catholic school children of St. Bede's. The protestant children, such as Annie and her sister, and about half of her neighborhood's kids, looked down upon the Irish Catholic schoolchildren who walked to St. Bede's Catholic school every day, what Annie spoke of as a jail-like place, where they brainwash you until you memorize bible passages. Annie is terrified of the catholic nuns, and thinks of them as bodiless creatures, with only a face showing. Her mother asks them to say hi to Annie. Some nuns say hi and freak out little Annie adn she cries because she is so scared of their collossal size, and lack of visible or identifyable body parts.

Chapter 7: A chapter about Annie's mother. Talks about how she favored modernism when she was in her twenties. Describes the art she bought and placed in her home, modern and bazarre. (For a really good character description, see page 36, or just read this whole chapter yourself, you lazy fools. I can't believe i'm doing this for people. I'm too kind). Speaks of her mother's joyous usage of a strange vocabulary, derived from Scottish talk. The chapter talks a lot about how the mother enjoyed jokes and humor as part of her everyday life. Family background on page 37. Mother's father was the mayor. Special mention of Mother telling the girls about Santa Claus and how Annie and her sister can hear the bells of Santa's sleigh...

Chapter 8: Annie goes to the dark alley behind her house and digs for pennies in the dirt. She begins acting like a scientist, doing experiments. Mentions Doc Hall, and his grim sister, some old people who go to St. Bede's Catholic church, and how grimacing and mean they are to children playing. Annie digs up a dime and continues going back to the alley a lot, looking for more treasure. "Treasure was something you found in teh alley. Treasure was something you dug up out of the dirt in a chaotic, half-forbidden, forsaken place far removed from the ordinary comings and goings of people who earned salaries in the light..."(Dillard, 41).

Chapter 9: Freedom of the streets. Mother gave Anne freedom to roam the neighborhood as soon as she could walk and recite their telephone number. Anne soon memorized the neighborhood and rode her bike around everywhere. She had a crush on a boy for two years, a boy who played football. Nothing really became of it. She went to Frick Park, even though her father forbade it. Anne noticed wildlife in Frick Park. She fantasized about meeting bums in the park and baking potatoes together under a bridge, and feeding the squirrels. Walking became like reading, well she read signs and such for navigation, and more and more, she stretched her mental map of town wider and wider. "What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?" (Dillard, 44).

Chapter 10: Some boys taught Annie to play football. She played with them a lot, and was welcomed by boys to play baseball with them. One winter around Christmas, she and the boys were standing out in the snow, she was making a snowball, and then the rest of the boys began making them, as a black buick drove by, and they all threw their snowballs at it. One snowball hit the windshield and made a crack in it, right by the driver. The driver got out, adn chased the kids all afternoon, and Annie and Mikey Fahey were chased around the neighborhoods, in the snow, incessantly, and he never stopped chasing them until they finally got warn out, and then he caught them by their jackets and chewed them out for it. Though defeated, Annie said she had never felt more victorious, because she was chased all over pittsburgh, terrified, exhausted, by a man who only wished to have a word with them. (almost word for word quoted...for the real quote, see page 49).

Chapter 11: Annie's parents enjoyed telling jokes. Jokes were the most important thing to them. Father kept a pocket book to write them all down in. Jokes were WAY over-analyzed by this family. This chapter is a long ramble about joke-telling and it is ornamented and satirical in the way that it is so overdone. The chapter just identifies every type of joke possible to make.

Chapter 12: Every summer, the kids and dad would go to their grandparents' summer house on Lake Erie. Oma, or grandma, is an odd and scandalously tacky old woman, who tells her granddaughters that when she was a teen, she "sewed rows of lace on her chemises, to bring her bust forward." (58). Anne and her sister, Amy, admired their grandmother's big breasts, long legs, slender hips, and her hideous sense of fashion. It seems that Oma was more relaxed and less hideous fashion-wise when she was staying at her vacation home, on Lake Erie, than when she was home in Pittsburgh. A breif and manly history of Grandpa, Frank Doak is mentioned. It pulls out the male gender role, yet again. see page 61. Anne tried to run away to Canada whenever she went out on the lake in a boat by herself. She never made it very far. She rode her bike around a lot, and played baseball with kids. Learned to whistle "the Wayward Wind," and then moved on to singing it at full volume on the porch, and grandpa told her its a sad song. Basically her summer lifestyle is all thoroughly written out in this chapter. Rivalry between Oma and mother-- mother finds Oma impractical (likely due to her harshly hideous fashion statements). Oma is rich and gaudy. Oma is old money, mother is new money.

Chapter 13: Everytime the girls returned home after a summer at Lake Erie, the house had been remodeled. Their family also moved a lot. When the girls came back, they family would spend some days at the neighborhood country club pool. Of course this didnt compare to the big lake Erie, and Anne talks about how stupid the pool feels. She goes there one afternoon, and finds a bird. This same afternoon is the afternoon her father is going to go down the river, she is ten years old, adn he is listening to 'lil' liza jane' on the radio. This is a 'plot' loop back to a beginning chapter. Annie starts to read 'Kidnapped'. She is finding new and interesting words.

Chapter 14 (Part Two of the book): Talks about the clean city of Pittsburgh, adn the historical district and museums and how stupid Anne thought it all was. Oma's rich life mentioned. Mother's crazy cycle of remodelling the houses that Anne's family lives in, and how she never came home to anything familiar, but she still liked the surprise after each summer. Gives a brief tour of the city and all interesting locations. Speaks of how Scottish and Calvinist influences shaped Pittsburgh society. Talks about how much history Anne and other children her age probably knew, and how much they made up themselves. She only used history to feed her imagination."

Answer 2

This Site Might Help You.

RE:
Study guide for "An American childhood" of Anne Dillard?
I'm an English learner. I'm having trouble of understanding this book. Because it has too many metaphors. Can anyone help me finding a study guide for this book. I think it's kinda hard to find one because it's a non-fiction book.
Thanks for ur answer. Really appreciate it!