Outside Passage: A Memoir of an Alaskan Childhood

Outside Passage is notable as much for what it doesn't say as for what it does. As this memoir opens, 11-year-old Julia Scully and her 13-year-old sister, Lillian, arrive alone in Nome, Alaska, circa 1940 -- a town notable for its barren extremes. Then, with the force of a jump cut, Scully rushes us further back in time and place. In San Francisco, four years earlier, on a brilliant October day, she discovers her father's dead body in their dark apartment. The instant is forever imprinted on her mind, yet the ever-reticent narrator leaves us to imagine the scene and her reaction. "I don't know what happened next or even if I saw my father there on the kitchen floor. I just remember my sister and me running ... back to the coffee shop, back to my mother, who didn't need to ask what we had found."From the start, the author makes it clear that her recollections may well differ from others' and that she has actually changed names to protect people and their survivors. As a memoir strategy, this has a pleasing restraint. In fact, however, pain and embarrassment figure heavily in Outside Passage, as the title's pun reveals. Scully knows full well the heavy price she and her sister and mother, Rose, paid for familial silence as they searched for a livelihood and safe home in the frozen north. The author is adept at conveying bewilderment, deprivation, and above all, the sense of being stranded. And in a book filled with freighted moments, mysteries, and secrets, she clearly leads us to conclusions inaccessible to her younger self. Her sister, for example, claims to have no memory at all of their childhood. "And so I realize that I was alone," Scully writes of her teenage self. "For if she remembers none of it, then, in a way, she wasn't really there, and so there's no one, no one in this whole world, who can tell me if it is true, no one who can tell me if I remember things the way they really happened." Outside Passage paradoxically tells far more -- and is far more modern -- than its gushing, revelation-crammed counterparts.