Down They Forgot

A memoir of an American childhood and adolescence set in the turbulent 1960s and 70s, down they forgot traces the story of a girl finding her way in a family overshadowed by mental illness. Social and political discontent-assassinations, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, drugs and dropping out-inform this haunting story about personal identity and the consequences of loneliness, despite the passionate and fleeting friendships of youth.This is an exquisitely written memoir by Abby Letteri. I read this account of her life as a child in the 60s and teenager of the 70s in one sitting. Vivid, haunting, terrific.-Eirlys Hunter, The Mapmaker's RaceLetteri 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