This Boy's Life: A Memoir

Tobias Wolff

Dec 2007 · Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

About this ebook

The PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author recounts coming of age in 1950s Washington State with his mother and abusive stepfather in this classic memoir.

This unforgettable memoir, by one of our most gifted writers, introduces us to the young Toby Wolff, by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling, and ultimately winning. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the move. As he fights for identity and self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of a new stepfather, his experiences are at once poignant and comical, and Wolff masterfully re-creates the frustrations, cruelties, and joys of adolescence. His various schemes—running away to Alaska, forging checks, and stealing cars—lead eventually to an act of outrageous self-invention that releases him into a new world of possibility.

Praise for This Boy’s Life

“Wolff writes in language that is lyrical without embellishment, defines his characters with exact strokes and perfectly pitched voices, [and] creates suspense around ordinary events, locating the deep mystery within them.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“[This] extraordinary memoir is so beautifully written that we not only root for the kid Wolff remembers, but we also are moved by the universality of his experience.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A work of genuine literary art . . . as grim and eerie as Great Expectations, as surreal and cruel as The Painted Bird, as comic and transcendent as Huckleberry Finn.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Wolff’s genius is in his fine storytelling. This Boy’s Life reads and entertains as easily as a novel. Wolff’s writing and timing are superb, as are his depictions of those of us who endured the 50s.” —The Oregonian

Ratings and reviews

A good book if you want to think. For me it was really easy to connect to a lot of feelings in this book. Tobias Wolff is really good at getting those specific, hard to explain feelings across. 👍

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About the author

Tobias Wolff was born in Birmingham, Alabama on June 19, 1945. He served in the military as a paratrooper during the Vietnam War. He received a B.A. in 1972 and a M.A. in 1975 from the University of Oxford and a M.A. in 1978 from Stanford University. He held faculty positions at Stanford University, Goddard College, Arizona State University, and Syracuse University. He was also a reporter for the Washington Post. His first collection of short stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, won the St. Lawrence award for fiction in 1982. His other works include Back in the World, In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of a Lost War, The Night in Question, Old School, and Our Story Begins. The Barracks Thief won the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction in 1985. This Boy's Life: A Memoir won the Los Angeles Times Book prize in 1989 and was made into a 1993 film starring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. He also won three O. Henry Awards in 1980, 1981, and 1985 and the National Medal of Arts in 2015. He edited several anthologies of short stories including Matters of Life and Death: New American Stories, A Doctor's Visit: Short Stories by Anton Chekhov, and The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories.