Tobias Wolff’s eloquent and perceptive classic memoir of a grim boyhood in the Pacific Northwest, published in 1989, is remarkable for its novelistic feel. He and his mother, with whom he is exceptionally close, leave Florida in search of uranium and eventually wind up in Seattle. There, an adolescent Wolff tries on different personae, chasing schemes to reinvent himself. Wolff sketches himself and others with equal vibrance and complexity. He is rebellious, wily—and tender and vulnerable. His mother is friendly and makes the world friendlier with her sympathy, and is repeatedly tyrannized. His abusive stepfather beats him and steals from him—but here, that behavior tilts toward dark comedy. This is an autobiography in which class repeatedly rears its head, influencing what seems possible to young Wolff, yet we absorb the book’s understandings not from exposition but directly from its beautifully rendered drama.
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THIS BOY'S LIFE (30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION): A MEMOIR, BY TOBIAS WOLFF
