Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Time of the Suburb
- 1 The Everyman and his Car: Metropolitan Memory and the Novel Sequence
- 2 Suburban Gothic and Banal Unhomeliness
- 3 Some Shared Story: Suburban Memoir
- 4 Houses, Comics, Fish: Graphic Narrative Ecologies of the Suburban Home
- 5 Devolved Authorship, Suburban Literacies and the Short Story Cycle
- Conclusion: Built to Last? Staging Suburban Historicity in the Teardown Era
- Notes
- Index
3 - Some Shared Story: Suburban Memoir
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Time of the Suburb
- 1 The Everyman and his Car: Metropolitan Memory and the Novel Sequence
- 2 Suburban Gothic and Banal Unhomeliness
- 3 Some Shared Story: Suburban Memoir
- 4 Houses, Comics, Fish: Graphic Narrative Ecologies of the Suburban Home
- 5 Devolved Authorship, Suburban Literacies and the Short Story Cycle
- Conclusion: Built to Last? Staging Suburban Historicity in the Teardown Era
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Now I am looking hard and I cannot locate our lives amidst all the sameness below, and that is what terrifies me. That is what terrifies and instructs. A child absorbs such a vision and begins to sense, at some level, the imperative of making a bigger meaning of things. I wonder whether all these people living just like me might be my people– all of us, perhaps, with some shared story. I wonder whether the pattern below might be a mass of connections joining me to some whole.
David Beers, Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of America’sFall from GraceIf the novel constituted the principal vehicle for telling suburban stories in the post-World War II period, in the decades around the millennium it has given ground to another platform: memoir. Such a development should come as little surprise. As members of the suburban baby boom have entered late middle age, they have become increasingly willing and able to tell their own life stories. Those who were cradled by the newly built habitats of the 1940s, 50s and 60s are liable to feel an especial affinity with these places. After all, they came into the world at the same time, a period often couched as a moment of optimism; by the same token, the maturation of the suburbs provides memoirists with an analogue to their own ageing. This personal affinity is typically tempered, however, by an awareness that a suburban upbringing is hardly a unique experience. In the opening quotation, David Beers describes how a realisation of the ubiquity of his way of life first occurred in childhood, while flying above his suburban neighbourhood in a light aeroplane with his father. The perspective is terrifying because it is so depersonalising; the details of a life diffuse into abstraction. But it is also instructive: identifying one's situation within a much larger pattern promotes an understanding of how one's life– and those of countless others– has been shaped by impersonal forces. The memoirist's retrospection may constitute a similar sort of optic, and perhaps that is what Beers is really describing here; as another memoirist claims, to have begun life in a middle-class suburb ‘entitles a person to a generic memory’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Literature of Suburban ChangeNarrating Spatial Complexity in Metropolitan America, pp. 125 - 160Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020