There are two reasons to read memoirs: The first is to feel less alone. We read memoirs to hang out with someone while they tell the stories of their life. As we read, we see parts of ourselves reflected back at us and think, “Oh, yeah, I know that feeling. I’m so glad this author put it into words.” The second reason is to try on the clothes of a life as different from our own as possible. These memoirs offer us glances into worlds that are far away, hard to get to, or don’t exist at all anymore.

Readers who prefer either type will be rewarded when they pick up Patrice Nganang’s new memoir, Scale Boy: An African Childhood, but they’ll have to work for it. 

The book tells the story of Nganang’s upbringing in Cameroon in the 1970s and 1980s. His civil-servant father and seamstress mother encouraged both a sense of industriousness and connectedness in their son. There are many scenes where young Patrice is listening to the radio or reading a book. He also works at Papa Mama’s garage, where his parents think he is learning to become a mechanic. (What he’s really learning is another story.) 

As his book’s title suggests, Nganang often made extra money as a “scale boy,” someone who carried a scale around and got paid any time somebody wanted to weigh themselves. His scale was crafted in Germany, and it becomes a character in its own right. 

Nganang’s time spent lugging it around gives him an early education in becoming a writer. While not stated explicitly, it’s easy to imagine that, by observing his parents, the neighbors, or the tenants on his family’s compound, Nganang — the author of multiple novels, including Mount Pleasant and When the Plums Are Ripe — learned a few things about plot, dialogue, and setting.

Meanwhile, the detritus of colonialism looms over Cameroon as Nganang and his compatriots grapple with the malign legacy of the French, German, and British forces that alternately sought to control the region. Among other episodes, Nganang chronicles a violent but ultimately unsuccessful coup in 1984, recounting it from his perspective as the teenager he was at the time. 

Although the memoir is about “an African childhood,” it is far from child’s play. Rather, Scale Boy is a 400-plus-page tome published in this era of 30-second Instagram reels. In other words, it’s a challenging read — not The Fault in Our Stars kind of hard but the Ulysses or Moby-Dick kind. (Which may explain why Scale Boy made so many promising-new-release lists but garnered relatively few reviews. The book requires focus and patience.) 

In a note near the end, Nganang shares that this is the first work he has published “in what is obviously bilingual, multilingual English,” with phrases and bits of dialogue in French, Hausa, or other African languages peppering the text. For monolingual readers (including most Americans), this can make the experience alienating at first. Cameroon has hundreds of local languages, but as Nganang explains in his one and only footnote, “Cameroonians don’t footnote their speech.”  

Sometimes, uncommon terms are translated or otherwise clarified, but usually they are not; confusion is a sensation the reader simply has to get used to. The linguistic chaos, though, is part of the point. Writes Nganang:

“All of the languages spoken around us reminded me of the Law of the City: in Yaoundé, if you can understand half the things people say, you are lucky.”

Adding to the disorientation, ages and dates are scarce in these pages. As Nganang tells the tales of his adolescence, he seldom mentions how old he was or what year a given event happened. There are also jumps back and forth in time, as if time itself were three-dimensional rather than linear. Names, too, are mercurial in Cameroon, where people can have many different ones that vary by circumstance or dialect. “Bangangté people have a thousand names each,” explains the author, “to protect ourselves from the harshness of life.” 

In the end, Scale Boy might feel to readers unfamiliar with Cameroon the same way Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” feels to those unfamiliar with 18th-century England. In the latter case, it’s the reader’s job to find out whom “the Pretender of Spain” refers to. In the former, the reader must learn what granduras, sanjas, and other things are.

Perhaps reading, like traveling, should be an act of de-centering ourselves. By working to understand different cultures, we also work to undo the horrors of colonialism. Because it forces us to do that work, Scale Boy is worth its weight in gold. 

Gretchen Lida is an essayist and an equestrian. She is a contributing writer to the Independent and Horse Network. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Rumpus, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is also recipient of the 2024 Paul Somers Prize for Creative Prose from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature.