This Boy's Life
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.69 (687 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B003EH139I |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 337 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-01-10 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
The winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction writes a memoir that brings to life the stuff of boyhood--from paper routes to whiskey, fistfights to friendship and betrayal--and captures as well America in the fifties.
A Wolff in Boy's Clothing Tobias Wolff is sure that "everything was going to change when we got out West." And so the boy tags along on the peregrinations of his adventuresome mother. Her intention is to find peace within herself, and a place for herself and her son within a wider world equally intent on allowing them anything but that.Autobiographical, gritty realism, and wonderful story-telling. Lacks the bravado, the self-importance, and the claustrophobia of th. Dawna Robertson said Only a great story-teller could ultimately thrive after such a childhood.. Wolff seemed to have so little going for him: no real home life, no guidance or stability, no strong foundation for a sense of self. Yet, he ultimately gained well-earned recognition as a great writer. I suspect the act of writing -- the desire to make sense of a chaotic world through honest analysis of emotion-- served to save and sustain him in life. This is a tough, well-written memoir.. "Not great" according to Megs. I love memoirs, but this one was kind of hard for me to get through. I didn't find Tobias to be very likable as a youth. He seemed to be a liar and a trouble maker. I do feel for him because he was definitely mistreated by his step father, and maybe he acted out because of that. But overall, I didn't find myself cheering for the writer as I normally do with memoirs. I liked the writing style but the story itself was hard for me.
. The story is pretty grim: Teenaged Wolff moves with his divorced mother from Florida to Utah to Washington State to escape her violent boyfriend. Deception, disguise, and illusion are the weapons the young man learns to employ as he grows up--not bad training for a writer-to-be. When she remarries, Wolff finds himself in a bitter battle of wills with his abusive stepfather, a contest in which the two prove to be more evenly matched than might have been supposed. Fiction writer Tobias Wolff electrified critics with his scarifying 1989 memoir, which many deemed as notable for its artful structure and finely wrought prose as for the events it describes. So