A Childhood

“Crews’s grossly overlooked A Childhood: The Biography of a Place magically pointed out to me my own lah-dee-dah poses. It’s underrated—virtually unknown—except among the aficionados of the form. I used to worry it wasn’t as good as I thought (…) until I decided any aversion to it was a form of abject classism, which insists on marginalizing any working-class scribbler.(…) Reading Crews, I found the courage to tell the stories I’d been amassing my whole life.”—from The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr
 
“This memoir is for everyone. It’s agile, honest and built as if to last. Like its author, it’s a resilient American original.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“A Childhood is not about a forgotten America, it is about a part of America that has rarely, except in books like this, been properly discovered."—The New York Times Book Review