Black Boy #1

             Most what happens in this book is the narrator getting abused by family, "friends", and random strangers. He starts out the book as a four year old, nearly getting whipped to death by his own mother. And she didn't learn her lesson, apparently, because she does it continuously throughout the book for any and every offense. He refuses to fight the street gang? The punishment is whipping. He joins a gang? Whipping. Reading a "blasphemous" book? Whipped. It clearly doesn't work, either, because if he really wanted to do something like reading, he would keep doing it and not care about the consequences.
             He moves away from his house several times in just fifteen years. Once for his mom to have better job opportunities, once to his grandma's house for the summer, once to his aunt's house, (which ends because his uncle was shot), once to his other uncle's because his mother suffered from several paralyzing strokes, and once in an orphan home because his mother couldn't afford to take care of him. As a result of this he never got a full year of school in fifteen years, and he learned how to read and count from his family and sometimes random delivery men. I'm surprised he managed to gather enough vocabulary to write the book as detailed as he did.
           Speaking of details, almost every encounter is heavily detailed with his feelings, senses, and what other people did around him. It must be hard to remember as far back as four years old, but he remembered every detail of a single, albeit very important and exciting, day. I barely remember what my house looked like at four, and I'm much closer to four than the author was when he wrote this. I wonder if I'm going to be able to detail accurately at all, or whether I'll be making things up that didn't actually happen by mistake as part of a misunderstanding. He could have asked family members about what happened when he was younger, but they couldn't know what he was feeling at the time.
            Even if I did remember what I did at four, it's not going to be as monumental or major-society-problem-addressing as Black Boy. I barely had any problems, and I feel any problems I did have weren't "accidentally burning the house down" or "struggling with understanding racism". And I'm thankful for that. But people normally write memoirs to address issues or tell a story, and I don't think I have either of those. I'll have to think about this more in detail when I write it.