There’s a thin line between precocious and overly precious, and this literary debut steps well across it. “I’d presented my childhood as full of whimsy and mystery rather than sadness, so much so that I’d started to believe this version as well.” “These sorts of conditions never fully go away,” she writes. Ultimately, LaCava married (which we learn about in the acknowledgements) and learned from a reunion with a French classmate that he (and presumably others) hadn’t considered her so troubled, that all kids passed through that difficult stage, but she was correct that the other girls hadn’t liked her much. Much of the memoir concerns her adolescent “boredom verging on insanity, locked inside with my little belongings and endless ruminations.” Then there are the footnotes on the objects that became talismans, such as a skeleton key she found: “Consider the power of the early locksmith: his still was synonymous with security, and knowledge of his craft was hard to come by, as talented locksmiths didn’t want to share their secrets,” she writes by way of preamble to an explanation that runs three times as long. But it does now.” To the writer, perhaps, but not necessarily to readers, who may also have trouble appreciating the connections she sees. I had never been patient enough to believe that looking back my sadness would all make sense. “My strength with the written word,” she writes, “is the ability to make unlikely subjects somehow connect, a capacity that has never been my strong suit in life. A self-consciously odd coming-of-age memoir in the form of essays about places and objects.Ī fashion writer and blogger, LaCava suffered some sort of depressive breakdown as a teenage American transplanted to France, but the details are sketchy, particularly in comparison with footnotes that often run longer on the page than the main text.
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