In This Boy’s Life, Jack, as the young Tobias Wolff rechristens himself, grapples with “what a man should be.” But when I first picked up the memoir as a freshly minted teenage girl, I read it as a guide to becoming a new sort of woman. Like Jack, I was desperate for metamorphosis, eager to leave behind my gawky, geeky middle-school self for some “ripe and lovely” creature, like Jack’s crush, Rhea, or his stepsister Norma. Never mind that Norma ends up marrying a Seventh-day Adventist with a rotten personality, growing “pale and angular” as she stares down a lifetime of disappointment. My adolescent brain didn’t look that far ahead.

Young Jack’s assessment of his female peers confirmed a familiar message: Women were divided into two distinct types. On the one hand, you had the Normas and the Rheas. Gorgeous and unattainable, whose “heartbreaking slice of creamy inner arm” might send a boy into paroxysms of yearning. And then there were the lesser beings crushed beneath that pedestal—disposable, “hysterically miserable girls” trying “to catch the attention of boys who would be sure to use them badly.” As Jack readily admits, he, too, treats girls who show interest in him “swinishly,” declaring that he “only ever wanted what [he] couldn’t have.” Irritatingly, I found none of this particularly actionable. The girls in that dreamy first category didn’t do much of anything to achieve that status—they just effortlessly were.

But the problem with reading coming-of-age stories when you are coming of age is that you can miss the forest for the trees, the distance between the narrator’s youthful perspective and the larger story sprinkled in by the adult author. And when I returned to This Boy’s Life some 25 years later, I was astonished to discover the complex, flawed, and decisively active female character I’d overlooked as a teen. One who utterly refuses simple categorization: Jack’s mother, Rosemary.

To the extent that I remembered Rosemary from my middle-school years, I pictured her as a docile lure for Jack’s violent stepfathers. And, indeed, she both attracts and is used badly by volatile and unworthy men, not so unlike the girls Jack is quick to dismiss. But what struck me as an adult reader was how she defies our notions of “victimhood” and remains the undisputed protagonist of her life.

Rather than some damsel in distress, Jack’s mother comes closer to a different archetype: that distinctly American agent of perpetual reinvention, the pioneer. When Rosemary whisks Jack from Florida, to Utah, they leave “to get away from a man [his] mother was afraid of and to get rich on uranium.” The man—Roy—becomes an afterthought, an excuse to pull up stakes and “change [their] luck.” Like all good adventurers headed west, Rosemary intends to make it big and strike gold. While young Jack obsesses over his Winchester rifle and the mythology of the frontier, it’s his mother who becomes a “real deadeye,” later showing up another lackluster husband at a shooting competition. Indeed, what propels the pair from state to state, from town to town, is her “freedom, her delight in her freedom, her dream of transformation.”

Yet footloose freedom doesn’t square easily with motherhood. It’s no surprise that Rosemary packs herself and Jack up for another journey after Roy, who’s stalked them to Salt Lake City, suggests adding a baby to the family. A 10-year-old can be ballast—an infant might shore the ship forever. Still, as young Jack digs into trouble in Seattle, Rosemary makes the sacrifice we so often expect of mothers: She agrees to marry “puppyish, fawning” Dwight out of a sense of “duty which she would be selfish not to acknowledge.” Rosemary trades the unconventional life she’s built—the job, the house that she and Jack share with two other women—for one she hopes will provide stability for her son. And even as that decision backfires and bitter, volatile Dwight becomes Jack’s torturer in chief, Rosemary doesn’t sink into despair. She maintains that rare ability to make “the world seem friendly”; she continues to expect people to be “likeable and interesting”; she refuses, in short, to let the world run her down. And while her dreams of reinvention grow less quixotic—it’s a hard-won secretarial position rather than a uranium deposit that frees her from Dwight—they never falter.

Do I wish I could shake my blindered teenage self, the one who read right past Jack’s mother, sorting her into a prefab gendered box before discarding her entirely? Sure. Then again, as I find myself approaching 40, the mother to two small children, I know I appreciate Rosemary more now than I ever could have then. When we’re young, it’s easy to dream of transformation—even if those dreams are circumscribed by what we imagine society wants from us. As we grow older, though, it becomes downright radical to believe we can reinvent ourselves. The real gift Rosemary leaves her son doesn’t require a sacrifice at the altar of conformity. Although young Jack, always yearning for a more typical upbringing, never acknowledges it, his mother’s unconventionality instills his steadfast belief that there’s “no obstacle to miraculous change but the incredulity of others.” A belief, Wolff admits, “that died hard, if it ever really died at all.”•

Join us on October 17 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Wolff will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Carol Edgarian to discuss This Boy’s Life. Register for the Zoom conversation here.