REFLECTIONS FROM THE SHADOW OF LOS ANGELES

In this elegiac memoir, Schneider remembers his youth in the 1960s and ’70s in Southern California.

The author’s parents moved to Southern California as part of the “great migration of the early 1950s,” the beginning of the “golden age” of the state. He was a happy and creatively mischievous child—he learned, long before the internet demystified such things, that saltpeter could be used to make homemade gunpowder, a discovery that made for an unfortunately potent science project. His childhood had a wholesome quality; his family was obsessed with Disneyland (“our holy grail, the promised land”). Upon turning 9, the author requested and received a single share of Disney stock. Once, his Uncle Rob took him on a kind of safari expedition to see, for the first time, hippies, memorably described by Schneider as a “mysterious and fearsome subculture.” Tragically, the brightness of his childhood was dimmed by a horrific event—on the evening before his 10th birthday, the author was sexually assaulted by his grandfather, a violation that shook Schneider deeply and robbed him of something tenderly innocent. “Literally overnight, all my implicit and unquestioning trust, my deeply undifferentiated, unconditional life-long love and adoration and affection for him, had been replaced by hate. I hated him with a deep glaring hatred. I hated him more than anything in the world. And that hatred continued unabated for years.” The author’s openness is deeply admirable—without sentimentality or rancor, he invites readers into the most intimate recesses of his life. His writing is somehow both anecdotally informal and lapidary, and, at its best, it rises to the poetic. While a profoundly melancholic thread runs through this remembrance, it also has a good deal of lightsome, genuinely funny humor. This is a delightfully thoughtful memoir—one can only wish it were longer.

A meditative and moving recollection conveyed in elegant prose.