Book Recommendation: "Down the Steep" by A.D. Nauman, from Fiction Alumnus Michelle Reid-Powell

Each of us is an anthology, a walking, breathing compilation of the stories we have been told and those we tell ourselves. Who am I? Where do I come from? What does it mean to be from that place, at that time, with that family? What does it mean to belong? What do I believe and how did I become so sure of it?

While the process of curating our personal short story collections never ends, we get down to serious editing in adolescence, that humiliating, pimpled crossroads where we challenge the narratives written for us while clumsily forging our own, often with too little judgement and far too much drama.

Enter the brilliant, brave, heart wrenching coming-of-age novel Down the Steep by A.D. Nauman.

It is 1963 in the Jim Crow South. Willa McCoy is a clever, curious 13-year-old, aching to be the hero in her own story. Instead, she is an “extra,” a “backup” for her older sister; she is “born to be peripheral” in a family – and world – where women are only as good as their looks and utility. She longs to impress her father: the assistant principal at the local high school, high-ranking member of the local KKK, “head of household, knower of all things, celestial object around which we were all naturally to revolve.”

But when Willa is sent to babysit for northerner Ruth Swanson, she is exposed to new ideas and new people, notably Langston Jones, a black student. As Willa’s personal experiences call into question what she has been taught to believe, she makes the mistakes of a teenager who is clearly very smart but not yet wise. Her attempts at agency result in a series of escalating disasters that propel the plot toward an intense and unexpected ending.

Nauman takes on this serious and difficult subject matter with courage and grace. She holds up a town and its people, turns it this way and that in order to explore each facet of these specific characters, at this specific time, in this specific place, as they make choices informed and misinformed by the stories they tell themselves and each other.

In doing so, she manages to craft a novel about one family that begs us to look at society, a story about one town that forces us to examine the larger culture, a novel about the past that turns a critical eye to the present.

Down the Steep is a great book by a truly talented writer. Highly recommended.