When writing fiction about childhood and rites of passage, one can't escape the sorrow of maturation, the painful process of shedding one's skin to inhabit a new identity. Oral narratives evoke these transformations in often stark and vivid language: an armless maiden on a journey to become whole; the girl whose feet are battered from walking seven years in iron shoes; the hero who is torn to pieces and tossed over a cliff until a fantastic cow licks the broken part together and restores him. The transition from one identity to a new one is where the tension of the narrative lies--will one survive such a process? So, I was taken by these two quotations from very different works and wrote them down in my notes:
The first is from Carlos Ruiz Zafón's gorgeous gothic novel, The Shadow of the Wind: "One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. When the mind can comprehend what has happened, the heart's wounds are already too deep." Imagine the intensity of such felt knowledge as a child and, later, the revelation in adulthood about the long-lasting impact of such a wound. For the child, it is about surviving the injuries; for the adult, it is trying to reconcile the contradictions of such moments in one's life.
The second quotation comes from Early Spring, the memoir of Danish author Tove Ditlevsen. Ditlevsen grew up in a brutal and barbaric working-class family with little respect for her as a girl and even less for her hopes of becoming a writer. It was a stifling, heart-breaking world; it is a marvel that she survived it and eventually thrived as an author. She muses about her childhood experience in a dark chapter that opens with, "Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can't get out of it on your own." This is important because it suggests that whatever self-awareness one has about the heart's wounds from childhood, we instinctively search for those who can give us a hand out of that coffin-like despair. Friends, older siblings, fairy godmothers, and even long-dead authors whose works give us a view much larger and more abundant in scope than our own.