For many years, Shane McCrae would describe the experience of his childhood and adolescence while assiduously avoiding use of the word “kidnap”. McCrae grew up in the 1980s, when, as he observes, kidnap was one of those “faddish” crimes that briefly seized the public imagination in the US after a series of high-profile child kidnappings. “In the 90s, gang crime is something we were obsessed with. And in the 80s, kidnapping was a thing that was really on the mind of folks a lot. I remember thinking: what would happen if that happened to me? Not really understanding that I was in the midst of one. It had already happened to me.”
McCrae’s story is complicated and traumatic, and he has spent the past five years fully confronting it for the first time by writing his memoir, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun. The book, which is told in jagged, circular fragments familiar to anyone who has read McCrae’s poetry, tells of how, in 1979, when he was three, McCrae was dropped off by his father at his maternal grandparents’ house in Salem, Oregon, for what was supposed to be an overnight visit. When McCrae’s father, Stanley, turned up on Monday morning to fetch his son, he found – incredibly – an empty house with a for sale sign in the yard. McCrae wouldn’t see his father again until he was 16 years old.
