Mountain Ash

Jim French looks back on the first eighteen years of his life in this memoir, drawing on memory to recount them. He frames his story as a journey familiar from myth, one that opens in a place of innocence and then casts him out into harder terrain. Along the way he experiences elation and despair as he works to shape that rough country into something he can live in.

The road is not easy. Jim comes face to face with violence, loss and death, but also with moments of real beauty. Those who look after him come to his aid at key points, men and women who shelter him and pass on the skills he needs to get by in the world.

Rather than a single continuous narrative, the book is made of linked short pieces that together trace his growing up. Each piece adds another feature to the landscape of his youth, so the whole reads as a map of how he came of age.