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I wouldn’t like to know my 13 year old self. I was pretty self-absorbed and succumbed to peer pressure and was not as nice to others as I grew up to be. And, I was still a really nice and respectful kid in general! I think the majority of people have evolved since their teenage years and that doesn’t need to be explicitly spelled out. He obviously went on to appreciate learning, get a university degree and have jobs outside the farm, and do multiple jobs at the same time as farming. Those outside experiences, I think, helped him to appreciate his farming way of life even more.
It’s a memoir. It’s his perspective. I thought he was being honest about his attitudes at different stages of his life. I thought the honesty actually made it more relatable. I have always lived in large urban areas. My husband grew up in a very small town that mostly revolves around farming or manufacturing jobs. The stories he tells about the attitudes of locals are astounding to me, but they are real and they remind me of some of the attitudes in this book about village life. There are people who grow up and never leave that county and don’t want to. He had friends who couldn’t understand why he wanted a university degree and left town and never came back. It’s just very different from what I experienced.
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