Credibility in Child Characters

Walls has a way of writing all of her self on the page. There is an immediacy about her words. It is because she is able to narrate in a way that is extremely descriptive and conversational. This memoir sometimes feels as if she wrote it all to herself or through pieces of conversations with loved ones. It is long-winded and fast moving, the way going back and forth to share childhood stories with your lover right before bed is. It is more than her strong language, which makes the reader feel like they are living everything she writes. Walls also has a strong sense of self and voice, which really is what establishes the pace and the “telling” of this story. She is reliable in that she gives us the entirety of the experience, arguably, and comes off truly knowledgeable about every details that encompasses these experiences, while still remaining so young. She ends each chapter with a line that is moving forward— not cliffhangers, but the sense that story is continuing further and deeper. 

This relates deeply to her establishment and creation of credibility and reliability, it is very much so a piece of the whole. Walls begins her memoir at the age of three, a time that most of us cannot remember beyond a handful of fading memories. She tells quite a linear and detailed story with such exactness. It is easy to be swept into her story, into these details about the tiny dots in the ceiling panels of her hospital room, and forget how far-fetched it is for a three year old to be able to remember with such accuracy. Although Walls tells her story from underneath the ironing board, as a child that does not understand what rape or sex work is and a child who doesn’t contextualize the reality and seriousness of her family’s poverty, there is an overwhelming amount of adult insight. 

Perhaps we are to believe that she is, in fact, “mature” for her age. But three year olds do not perfect chronology of life, such as their constant movement to places. What the reader is moved to accept is the adult narrator, the ghost narrator. It is not only grounding but strategic to begin a memoir with the adult narrator. This narrator hides in the shadows, pulling at puppet strings without notice. This has been a common feature of all of the works we have read thus far, but I am understanding the intentions behind Walls’ decision much differently than with Alvarado or bell hooks. 

Walls is able to take more risks with narrativizing her early-early years because the adult narrator becomes the ghost narrator that carries the rest of the story until the story progresses to the age/state/self that is the adult narrator. Credibility and reliability would simply not exist without this adult narrator. If one read the story without the first chapter, those short sentences and hypnotizing descriptions might not have been enough to make us believe that this three year old was able to cook these hot dogs, let alone remember all of the details of the accident and following experiences. The adult narrator is the sense-maker. Combined with aforementioned strong sense of self, which creates a flowing and consistent pace, Walls can make wild leaps with these youthful recollections.  

The ghost narrator is the one that is able to word the experience in a way that shows how her childhood was lacking basic necessities, while keeping her naive. “You never had to worry about running out of stuff like food or ice or even chewing gum,” she says, with the ghost narrator structuring this to make very clear implications. It is not at all hard to believe that Walls’ earliest memory is of being on fire. Or, for the matter, that her seemingly hyper-accurate in details derive from coming from a family of storytellers, esp her dad. That Walls was told the story so many times, it became her own real memory. 

Meaning, we remember what we most likely would not and could not have remembered. Or even us remembering a memory, like what we remembered later on in our childhood. In one of my novel chapters, I talk about my hospitalization for Kawasaki disease at three. It’s interesting to think about the details that we can give based on how we recall the stories given to us. This is a wonderful way to establish reliable narration from a young person in a way that suspends our disbelief. As the memoir continued, I found that the less that I rooted for the hilarious antics of her parents and the more I realized how abusive and terrible they were, the more impressed I was with how Walls gave such credibility/reliability to her child self. It allowed for that child character, although holding the hand of the adult/ghost narrator, to navigate the readers to this deep understanding. Essentially, the reader trusted her enough to see the world similarly to that of the narrator, so much so that the angle of discovery is simultaneous.Walls doesn’t really lose us. She keeps us going, flowing, feeling, growing with her the whole way. 

Van