Tobias Wolff’s memoir This Boy’s Life, the California Book Club’s October selection, is groundbreaking, not only in terms of how it conceives of boyhood but also in how it puts readers into young Tobias Wolff’s life, host John Freeman said at the start of the conversation. Freeman asked Wolff about creating the voice of a 10-year-old and whether there were things he wanted to do by telling the story from that point of view.
Wolff said that when he started writing This Boy’s Life, “I was doing it wrong at the beginning. I had to give up the things I had learned from being a 10-year-old and become that unlearned 10-year-old again. I had to, in a sense, put on the blindness, the naïveté of the boy I once was. I could not gift him with a kind of wisdom or insight that I really did not have at the time. That was not as hard as it might have been because there was, frankly, a part of me that has not quite grown up—as anyone close to me would quickly confirm.” However, Wolff was in the process of raising a couple of boys and a daughter at the time he wrote this book, and he believes that helped him find that perspective and be true to it in the telling of the story.
Freeman commented that violence is prevalent in this book, and this violence carries across Wolff’s mother’s partners. “One of the stories that the book tells is the story of how a boy develops pattern recognition, how to look for signs of what the adult world could possibly mean in terms of threats and the need for protection,” Freeman observed. Young Jack, as Wolff renamed himself in boyhood, after Jack London, is looking out for his mother. Freeman noted that it must have been painful to remember occurrences involving danger to his mother, not just for him.
Wolff said that the circumstances they were in were pregnant with violence. His mother’s boyfriend and then her husband were “bristling with firearms. They were both gun nuts.... The possibility of something going wrong was always there, and I was aware of it.” Even at night, when he lived at his abusive and eccentric stepfather Dwight’s house, Wolff said, Dwight was pointing a rifle in his house. Later, Freeman asked him if he had a sense of why Dwight behaved as he did, apart from his drinking. Wolff said that, in retrospect, he sees that Dwight was someone who had not been loved when he was young and didn’t know how to look for it, “and so he demanded it from the people around him with a desperation that was always going to be disappointed, which then curdled into anger and violence.” Wolff explained that while living with someone like that, “you don’t have the luxury to understand them. You’re just looking out to see if you can get through this day. I never felt a moment’s compassion for him when living with him.... That kind of compassion...was not in me at the time.”
Special guest Carol Edgarian, a longtime friend of Wolff’s and a novelist, joined the conversation. She’d spent the past few days rereading the memoir, which she sees as the making of a boy’s moral compass, as well as the making of a storyteller. “When you’re raised by wolves—you and I share that in common—where do you go?” she asked. “Do you fall into the abyss, or do you make life a little better than it is?” She talked about how This Boy’s Life could have been a “trauma drama” in a lesser writer’s hands and that she’s in awe of what Wolff put in and left out. The book is “without heat or hyperbole.” A scene that struck her was when Wolff writes about his mother’s father spanking her after the family had eaten dessert and requiring her to kiss him after. She asked, “Did you have to pull a lot back in the revision?”
“I found a lot of my experience in writing this book was leaving things out,” Wolff responded. “There is a pattern for me in the book, a kind of psychological and moral pattern.... Those things that just repeated more evidence for the formation of that pattern could go.” He cut a tremendous amount, but he didn’t cut out muscle or bone (or hopes he didn’t).
An audience member asked for Wolff’s views on reinvention and whether we’re always tethered to where we’re from. Wolff responded, “Our identity is created by the people around us, the things that happen to us, but also the story we tell about ourselves to ourselves, and it might not at certain points align exactly with external reality, but that is still part of the work you do to build a sense of who you are. That kind of self-storytelling is crucial to the development of a person’s character.”
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