AustLit

'That the boy depicted in Shannon Burns’s nightmarish memoir survived to write it at the age of forty reflects no credit on society or on those around him. His persistence seems remarkable, given the world he entered.' (Introduction)

'Shannon Burns’ memoir Childhood begins with an epigraph from Leo Tolstoy’s book of the same name:

The happy unrecoverable days of childhood! How could I not love, not cherish its memories? They have lifted up and refreshed my soul and served as the source of its finest pleasures.

The South Australian suburban childhood explored in this memoir is far from idyllic. Burns’ early life was one of disconnection, neglect, violence and poverty.' (Introduction)

'Anyone writing about their childhood must grapple with the intervening gulf of time, and with the strange slipperiness of memory. This is especially so for Shannon Burns, who today lives a stable, contented life in the higher echelons of Australia’s middle class, but whose early years, he now recognises, were chaotic and perilous, peopled by adults who were unreliable, volatile, and sometimes violent. Childhood charts Burns’ upbringing in 1980s suburban Adelaide: he is passed between his mother (his ‘true home’ (88)), his father and stepmother, various relatives, and foster carers. Aged fifteen, he leaves school, escapes his father’s place and finds work in a recycling centre. Despite all this dislocation and instability, and despite Burns’ well-developed talent for forgetting, Childhood doesn’t read as fragmentary or disjointed: rather, the narrative is sculpted so skilfully that it is never less than propulsive.'(Introduction)

'Childhood is a formative experience. And reading can be a transformative experience; between the lines and shelves of books there are spaces to inhabit and new ways to metamorphose. I found myself thinking about the contours of these experiences while reading Shannon Burns’ Childhood, which felt invigorating and courageous, at times breathtaking in the execution. Burns has the past interacting with the present with graceful uncertainty, tracing rifts and voids in memory. Often in life-writing there is a sense of mining the past, processing and refining its contents into a narrative that seems irrevocable and crystal-clear, leading to conclusions that point to redemption. Instead, many of the events detailed in Childhood remain uncertain due to the nature of their origin.' (Introduction)

'In Childhood, Shannon Burns quickly turns to speculation about why he, ‘a child of the welfare class’, managed, after his tumultuous early years, to find an exit route into the educated middle class, especially where many of his family members have not. I know for a fact that this is a question that plagues many people who grew up in similar circumstances to Burns, and it’s a question that I have posed and attempted to answer myself. It is precisely this analytical bent that drives us to have written these kinds of books, often clumsily dubbed trauma memoirs, in the first place.' (Introduction)