The first autobiography, a spiritual self-examination, written was Saint Augustine’s Confessions, around 400 CE. While venerable religious figures wrote first-person accounts of their lives early on, later, autobiographies were increasingly written by rulers to assert their power and buff their self-image. The first American president to write an autobiography about his White House years was Thomas Jefferson. Today, politicians write autobiographies, too, sometimes to signal their intentions to run for president and, on other occasions, to discuss past accomplishments. In 2006, before his presidential run, for instance, Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope laid out his ideas but also set forth some of his observations about his life and politics.
But autobiography should be distinguished from today’s memoir. The latter includes autobiography, but its emphasis is on memories and an excavation of the author’s self. Confessions worked partly this way, of course. Who can forget Saint Augustine’s self-indicting theft of pears? “Those pears truly were pleasant to the sight; but it was not for them that my miserable soul lusted, for I had abundance of better, but those I plucked simply that I might steal. For, having plucked them, I threw them away, my sole gratification in them being my own sin, which I was pleased to enjoy.”
This month’s California Book Club selection, This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff, may be the earliest American memoir to recount and arrange memories in such a way that they allow the author to probe his own beginnings and being, not to be venerated but for the sake of honest connection. Popular memoirs involving an ordinary person’s self-examination subsequently surged: Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, then Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, then Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes.
In one incident that feels a bit like a Tom Sawyer story but darker and sadder, Wolff describes his younger self, known as Jack, taking a blank check from a convenience book of them at the bank and then proceeding to attempt a bad check at the drugstore. The woman who catches on and flags his deceit, but is sorrowful about his actions and perhaps also that she needs to report them, then chases him down the street, not recognizing him later in the context of a banquet thrown by the Order of the Arrow, a Boy Scouts honor society.
There’s a sense, too, in which Wolff’s voice, perhaps coincidentally, takes on a bit of the tone of Confessions. His father, known as Duke, was Jewish but hid that and changed his name, we learn from his brother Geoffrey Wolff’s nonfiction book The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for biography. (One can imagine the prize judges finding too much of the first-person observation in this book in the years before genre-blending was popular.) Duke was a dedicated father with severe problems of character and addiction who conned a number of people and repeatedly bounced to prison but who, it seems, really loved the boys’ mother. In the book, their father tells Geoffrey, who became a critic, not to become one: “Fiction is the thing for you.... Write make-believe. You’ve got a feel for it.” Toby’s single mother raised him Catholic, and it was only in adulthood that Toby realized his Jewish background.
It’s Geoffrey who tries to cultivate Toby’s love of writing during his teen years and whose love instills in Toby the belief that he is a writer, something he’ll identify even before he joins the army and goes to Vietnam. Wolff recounts where this belief led him in In the Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War, explaining that he’d always wanted to wear a uniform and was in search of legitimacy—most of the men he’d ever admired, as well as the male writers he looked up to, had served: “It was laughable for a boy my age to call himself a writer on the evidence of two stories...but improbable as this self-conception was, it nevertheless changed my way of looking at the world.... No longer a powerless confusion of desires, I was now a protagonist, the hero of a novel to which I endlessly added from the stories I dreamed and saw everywhere. The problem was, I began to see stories even where I shouldn’t, where what was required of me was simple fellow feeling.” He explains that he became predatory about experience, which he fetishized, thinking of it as “the radical source of authority” in the writers he admired.
Later literary memoirs would also tell an ordinary person’s story, mining personal material and, at their best, examining themselves and faulting themselves as much as the people around them. The memoir trend was part of a larger movement in books, a trend away from elitism and toward people’s ability to write their own stories and publish them, that has accelerated in recent years. Confessionalism has become the norm and influenced, too, what people, at least in California, are willing to reveal about themselves, but the best memoirs are not only arranged memories but also storytelling.
Memory, we know, is fallible. In recent years, research findings have grown by leaps and bounds, and we know, now, that memory and imagination are bound up with each other and can affect how we see the past. So much of writing the kind of American memoir that Wolff pioneered involves arranging scenes and handling time and delving into the self, often painful or unflattering things about the self.
There are some factual gaps in This Boy’s Life around Toby’s father. When I read it the first time, I wondered about a custody arrangement that would have Toby stay with his single mother, who struggles for money, and Geoffrey stay with his father and go to prep school at Choate, which leads to Princeton. I thought that their father was consistently wealthy and wondered what was happening with child support and the lack of communication over the years between these two families that were once one. From Geoffrey Wolff’s book, we learn that unlike Toby, Duke grew up privileged, but his adult life was turbulent; while Duke’s lies and behaviors as an adult harmed people, he was also full of love for his family. Certain fascinating stories that Wolff hinted at in This Boy’s Life had already been written in The Duke of Deception, and what remains is, at its heart, a beautiful story of a lost son and his unusual mother.
The complexity and nuance and magnetic quality of Wolff’s This Boy’s Life is still refreshing after all these years. It rightly became a classic, a book to which one can return and be awakened by different things, a hallmark of great literature.•
Join us on October 17 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Wolff will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss This Boy’s Life. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
THE MAGIC OF “THIS BOY’S LIFE”
Author and critic Charles Finch praises the artistry and honesty of Wolff’s memoir. —Alta
OTHER PEOPLE’S LIVES
Author and journalist Gary Singh reviews Olivia Gatwood’s edgy debut novel, Whoever You Are, Honey, set in Santa Cruz, which is about “memory, aging, and nostalgia versus the ways that tech dehumanizes us.” —Alta
PLAYING WITH MATCHES
Critic Paula L. Woods reviews Rachel Howzell Hall’s terrifying What Fire Brings, “a fish-out-of-water thriller that takes place during the waning days of the COVID-19 pandemic and is set in the bohemian community of Topanga Canyon.” —Alta
OCTOBER RELEASES
Here are books by authors of the West that we’re excited about this month, including prior CBC author Rabih Alameddine’s Comforting Myths: Concerning the Political in Art, Ruben Quesada’s Brutal Companion, and Forrest Gander’s Mojave Ghost. —Alta
ISSUE 29
Alta Journal’s fall print quarterly, “Reckoning with the West,” wonderfully guest-edited by historian William Deverell, is now available. —Alta
THE MONSTER WITHIN
Alta contributor Chris Vognar writes about the excellent new nonfiction book from cultural historian Jeremy Dauber, American Scary: A History of Horror from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond, calling it “casually magisterial, endlessly erudite.” —Los Angeles Times
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