down they forgot: a memoir

down they forgot is a memoir of an American childhood and adolescence in the turbulence of the 1960s and 70s, a time of sweeping social and political discontent. Assassinations, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, drugs and dropping out all inform this haunting story about personal identity and the consequences of loneliness, despite the passionate and fleeting friendships of youth. This is a memoir with quiet, indelible descriptions of family - there are no villains, just survivors - set at a time when America was recognizing some unhappy truths of its own.

"down they forgot is a work of remarkable freshness. I admire the moral and ethical delicacy of the writing, which combines startling candour with this beautifully judged instinct to leave the mystery of personality in place. Abby favours fragments not just because memory seems to work like this but because the sort of hesitancy implied in the form is a great match for the psychology of this memorable family, where silence and looks create their own rich (and richly elusive) vocabulary."

-Damien Wilkins, International Institute of Modern Letters

"Letteri casts a wide net over her youth and wrests from that ocean of memory such gleaming treasures. The whole of youth is captured to perfection in these essays, the intimate and the political, the terrible and the joyous. In the end down they forgot does what the best memoirs must; it reveals Letteri's lost world while beckoning readers to recall their own."

-Lewis Buzbee, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop