What a gem of a memoir, I can't believe it had escaped my notice all these years. Haven Kimmel writes of "growing up small" in a very small town in Indiana, where the population always remains at 300, someone always replacing one who leaves. Her memories are funny, bittersweet and strikingly accurate--whether it's the neighborhood bully, the grumpy druggist, a best friend who doesn't talk much--Zippy takes every little bit of minutae and makes it humorous and real. I would have to think that her being that youngest third child, that those much older siblings Melinda and Dan helped keep some of those funny Zippy stories alive as she grew up. From how to name a rooster, a strange love of Kojak, or a shrine to her first bike with streamers and a banana seat, Zippy brought back many great memories of those simply childhood days. ( )

Absolutely hilarious true tales of life in a small town, told through the grown up eyes of a magical child nicknamed Zippy.
I'm going to have to read everything Haven Kimmel has written, she's that good. ( )

Funny, touching, brilliant. Genius. ( )

OK – this is only the second of Haven Kimmel’s books that I’ve read – and I have to say that she’s rocketing to the top of my favorite authors chart. “The Used World” was the first book of hers that I read and loved and now I can say that I like her fiction AND non-fiction.

I remember when “A Girl Named Zippy” came out…with that title and with that cover? Who could miss it? At the time, I dismissed it, I’m not sure why. Probably? Because the word Zippy was in the title. Foolish me!

“Not long ago my sister Melinda shocked me by saying she had always assumed that the book on Mooreland had yet to be written because no one sane would be interested in reading it. “No, no, wait,” she said. “I know who might read such a book. A person lying in a hospital bed with no television and no roommate. Just lying there. Maybe waiting for a physical therapist. And then here comes a candy striper with a squeaky library cart and on that cart is only one book – or maybe two books: yours, and Cooking with Pork. I can see how a person would be grateful for Mooreland then.”

Count me as grateful and/or insane. Though I probably never want to live in Mooreland, Indiana (population 300), I certainly enjoyed Kimmel’s lovingly drawn memoirs of her childhood there.

Back to the cover of the book, by the way? On at least my copy, it features a…striking picture of a child, I assume Haven Kimmel, which inspires one of the best quotes of the book. “When my mother first saw me in the hospital she looked up with tears in her eyes and said to my father, “I’ll love her and protect her anyway.”

This book is filled with a mix of very funny, very sad and sometime incredibly poignant stories. One passage might make me laugh out loud, and the next may have me silenced by its loveliness. After her father gives her a single egg as a reminder of a lost beloved pet, “I put it in the refrigerator, on a nest made out of a blue handkerchief. Over the next few days and weeks I took it out and looked at it many times, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I kept it so long that whatever was inside it completely dried up, and finally it was so light and insubstantial in my hand that it seemed barely to exist. It was just a sigh of a thing.”

I am far from a small town person, but one senses the love and nostalgia in Kimmel’s words that make a town with an unchanging population of 300 sound not too bad.

“When I think of getting up for church, it is always winter in our house, but when I think of the actual walk, a small town block – our house and yard and the house and yard of Reed and Mary Ball, who never ever left their front porch – it is always a perfect summer day that will wither in my absence.”

It’s that mixture of seeing with adult and child’s eyes simultaneously, and the acknowledgement of the eccentric things that are our memories that I think I appreciated the most. A mixture seasoned liberally with gentle humor.

“Yes, like a Shrine.” As far as I knew, Shrines wore absurd hats and drove miniature cars in circles during the Mooreland Fair Parade, and were praised, inexplicably, for burning children.”

Towards the end of the book, I finally caught on to the fact that Kimmel grew up in extremely poor circumstances. It’s not that she tries to hide that fact…it’s that nothing is written in a way to inspire pity or awe or sympathy. She lays the facts out, but then puts the focus on that which in her life was the most positive. The things didn’t matter…the people mattered.

“When he (her father) was at the wheel, everyone else could sleep because he never would. In short, he was what it meant to be a father and a man in 1971. Up against his power I could see none of his failings.”

And “Even though my mother almost never left the couch, she was a woman of many gifts, my favorite being her ability to make anything she was eating crunch. I still don’t know how she did it, and I tried to stump her with a wide variety of foods. “Aha! Try these raisins,” I would say triumphantly. And she’d put a couple of raisins in her mouth and crunch, crunch, crunch. She could make them sound like corn nuts.”

The love that Haven Kimmel has for her family, and the appreciation she seems to have for the gift that was her childhood comes shining through this memoir. I see that she wrote a second non-fiction book about her mother…and I am adding that to my wish list as we speak. I’m looking forward to another trip to Mooreland…in a literary way. ( )

http://amiralace.blogspot.com/2007/06... ( )