What’s the key to Tobias Wolff’s 1989 memoir, This Boy’s Life? I want to suggest it is the author’s unflinching willingness to expose his character as well as those of the people with whom he interacts. This is the most essential thing to understand about the art of memoir, that it is a form in which we excavate ourselves. In memoir, we deal with not what happened so much as how we remember those events, and the narrative that might be made from them.
Its subjectivity, then, is part of the point, if not the point entirely. We are writing to figure something out.
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
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For Wolff, such a concern is paramount, for his book is about the development of the self. Taking place during the 1950s, it traces his peripatetic early years with his mother; they traveled from Florida to the Pacific Northwest after her marriage to his father dissolved. There’s something Tolstoyan about that title (among Tolstoy’s books about his youth was one called Boyhood), with its tension between the collective and the personal. Such a divide animates the narrative, particularly after Wolff’s mother remarries and moves with her son to Chinook, Washington, where her new husband, Dwight, becomes a nemesis and a tyrant, although this is not to say he is without losses and sorrows of his own.
The complexity is important because it leads to empathy. This is what makes a narrative universal, which both this memoir and Wolff’s short fiction illustrate. I think of the insufferable critic in “Bullet in the Brain,” who in the last seconds of his life reveals the essence of his tormented humanity. Or the soldiers who center the novella The Barracks Thief, their status as outsiders not enough to redeem them. It’s not sufficient to describe such figures as unlikable; they are so much more nuanced, and anyway, what does unlikable mean? Everyone is unlikable or likable depending on the situation. Wolff encodes this deep into This Boy’s Life, tracing his own history of lies and petty crime.
The effect is a certain edgy complicity, especially after Wolff forges the records required to be accepted at boarding school. In making neither excuse nor apology, the memoir invites us to participate in its moral landscape, to think for ourselves about this narrator with whom we have become necessarily aligned.
What I mean is that our empathy for Wolff leads to empathy for everyone. It’s not a matter of good and bad but one of being human, a flawed state in which we behave for complicated reasons, many of which we can’t articulate. Dwight is a monster, yes, but he is also full of pain. The same, we might argue, is true of Wolff, whose indiscretions represent a flawed attempt at self-care. In that regard, This Boy’s Life is not about its narrator as hero. It is, rather, about the experience of living, which is the core of all literature.•
