Outside Passage: A Memoir of an Alaskan Childhood - Hardcover

In a tightly written, moving account, the author recounts her childhood in Alaska after the Depression ruined her parents and led to her father's suicide, a childhood filled with colorful people and a dramatic, almost surreal landscape. 30,000 first printing.

, in its way, demands your full attention. Like a slap in the face, the assault of the weather, the landscape, the sheer physical effort of enduring forces memories further and further away." In Outside Passage Julia Scully regathers the memories of her childhood, and, like the strange territory and time they cover--the isolated far western Alaskan frontier before and during World War II--these memories demand our full attention. They begin with her immigrant parents' efforts to make a living during the Depression in California and the Pacific Northwest. Faced with illness and despair, Julia's father commits suicide when she is seven, and she and her older sister, Lillian, discover his body. Julia's mother then leaves her daughters in a San Francisco orphanage and goes to Alaska, searching for an economic toehold at the edge of the continent.
        Julia seeks comfort in the rituals of the orphanage--learning how to knit and darn, roller-skating out