When Tobias Wolff published This Boy’s Life in 1989, the memoir form had yet to become pervasive. Certainly, there were precursors—Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time, both of which Wolff has cited as influential—but it wasn’t until Mary Karr published The Liars’ Club in 1995 that a sense of the contemporary memoir began to take shape. Wolff, then, was working without a net, adapting to a new approach even as, in some essential manner, he found it necessary to create it, to take what he understood about writing fiction (character, scene, and setting) and apply it to his life. The result is a book that, more than three decades later, continues to astonish, in both the depth of what it exposes and the complications of its heart.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
This interview appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
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I’m interested in the dynamic between fiction and nonfiction. This Boy’s Life was your first nonfiction work.
A lot of decisions I make are because other choices aren’t working. I had been wanting to write a novel about growing up with my mother. We had a picaresque life together for some years. She was quick to pack her bags and take off to some new place. She was a great adventuress, and I was very lucky to have her as my mother. But as I worked on this novel, it kind of died on me. So I started writing things as they had happened, not inventing, and it gave itself to me. It was a question of a path opening that I had not previously considered. Those are the moments any writer looks for, to feel the thing moving under your fingers. I was led by this book more than I pushed it into life.
A decade earlier, your brother, Geoffrey, published The Duke of Deception, about growing up with your father. Did his book give you pause?
I loved my brother’s book, but it made me feel like that base has been covered in our family. Then, as I started writing, I could see it taking me in a different direction. Our parents had split when we were very young. Geoffrey went with my father. I stayed with my mother. So his story was not my story, nor mine his. The realization gave me heart to think again about trying it for myself.
You had published short fiction and a novella, The Barracks Thief. What were the challenges of recalibrating to a longer manuscript?
The problem was controlling the length. You have to find a pattern in the experience you are recounting. You need to be as stern with yourself about your prose as you would be in a short story. It’s in some ways easier to be truthful in writing fiction, because of the distance. When you’re putting yourself on the page, there’s a natural tendency to protect yourself. I was aware of resisting that as I was writing. I didn’t see the point in such a book. But the truth carries you along, and even as I accepted the complications of other people, by that time in my life I’d learned to accept them in myself. There’s no point in writing unless you are willing to make an honest accounting of your part in events, which will often reflect no credit on you.
Your stepfather Dwight is an antagonist, although he’s portrayed with empathy.
I wrote this book knowing my mother would read it, my brother would read it, and the friends I’d grown up with would read it. I would have been embarrassed to have written something they thought was untrue. I was interested in the people I was writing about, including my stepfather, who was an alcoholic and a violent man. I feel lucky to have survived the five years I spent with him. At the same time, I saw his humanity, and I couldn’t ignore that. I wanted my eyes as open as possible and not narrowed to a particular band of vision.
Why do you write?
There’s a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins called “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” He’s describing this beautiful, flashing creature hovering over a stream. And there’s a line, almost spoken from the point of view of the kingfisher: “What I do is me: for that I came.” I can think of no better way to describe the vocation toward writing I’ve felt since I was a teenager. I just don’t feel complete unless I’m engaged in some writing project, and that’s been true since I was 21 or even younger. If I’m not writing, I feel guilty, like I’m not doing something I’ve been called to do. •
