Where the Light Fell

Philip Yancey’s memoir Where the Light Fell (Convergent) is, more than anything else, an excavation of a childhood—an upbringing many of us would perhaps have chosen to leave buried.

The story of his father’s death when Yancey was an infant is a story so shocking, so layered with grief and guilt, that he didn’t learn the truth until he was in college. And even then, he heard it from his grandparents, somewhat accidentally. Yancey writes about growing up with his brother and their single mom, poor and white in the South, bouncing around from house to apartment to mobile home, always immersed in a fundamentalist subculture that both sons would come to reject—albeit in different and wholly unexpected ways.

Yancey, who has published dozens of books in his career, says that in some sense this memoir is a prequel to all of those other books. Having read a handful of them over the years, I think especially of What’s So Amazing About Grace?, a book that embodies the kind of beautiful, robust, generous faith that’s possible after fundamentalism. Possible, but by no means inevitable.

Marilyn McEntyre has said, “In spite of ourselves, life equips us for what we can’t foresee and sometimes dread. The value of autobiography and memoir lies largely in the way the backward glance makes this process visible.”

In this memoir, Yancey does just that.