This Boy's Life: A Memoir

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More About This Book

Overview

In this unforgettable memoir of boyhood in the 1950s, we meet the young Toby Wolff, by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling, and ultimately winning. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the move. Between themselves they develop an almost telepathic trust that sees them through their wanderings from Florida to a small town in Washington State. Fighting for identity and self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of a new stepfather, Toby's growing up is at once poignant and comical. His various schemes—running away to Alaska, forging cheeks, and stealing cars—lead eventually to an act of outrageous self-invention that releases him into a new world of possibility.

The award-winning novelist's best-selling memoir.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
In PEN/Faulkner Award-winner Wolff's fourth book, he recounts his coming-of-age with customary skill and self-assurance. Seeking a better life in the Northwestern U.S. with his divorced mother, whose ``strange docility, almost paralysis, with men of the tyrant breed'' taught Wolff the virtue of rebellion, he considered himself ``in hiding,'' moved to invent a private, ``better'' version of himself in order to rise above his troubles. Primary among these were the adultsdrolly eccentric, sometimes dementedwho were bent on humiliating him. Since Wolff the writer never pities Wolff the boy, the author characterizes the crew of grown-up losers with damning objectivity, from the neurotic stepfather who painted his entire house (piano and Christmas tree included) white, to the Native American football star whose ultimate failure was as inexplicable as his athletic brilliance. Briskly and candidly reportedWolff's boyhood best friend ``bathed twice a day but always gave off an ammoniac hormonal smell, the smell of growth and anxiety''his youth yields a self-made man whose struggle to fit the pieces together is authentic and endearing. Literary Guild alternate. (Jan.)
Library Journal
Winner of the PEN/Faulkner award for The Barracks Thief , Wolff offers an engrossing and candid look into his childhood and adolescence in his first book of nonfiction. In unaffected prose he recreates scenes from his life that sparkle with the immediacy of narrative fiction. The result is an intriguingly guileless book, distinct from the usual reflective commentary of autobiography, that chronicles the random cruelty of a step father, the ambiguity of youthful friendships, and forgotten moments like watching The Mickey Mouse Club. Throughout this youthful account runs the solid thread of the author's respect and affection for his mother and a sense of wonder at the inexplicable twistings and turnings of the road to adulthood in modern America. Highly recommended. Linda Rome, Mentor, Ohio

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780802136688
  • Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
  • Publication date: 1/28/2000
  • Edition description: 1 GROVE PR
  • Pages: 304
  • Sales rank: 57,203
  • Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.30 (h) x 0.81 (d)

Meet the Author

Tobias Wolff
Tobias Wolff
Best known for his short stories and his autobiographical writing, Tobias Wolff riveted readers and held them fast with This Boy's Life, a groundbreaking literary memoir that redefined the genre for an entire generation.

Biography

Although Tobias Wolff has described his own youthful self as a liar and an imposter, he has achieved in his writing a level of honesty so unflinching it is almost painful to read. The author of two groundbreaking literary memoirs and several volumes of autobiographical fiction (short and long), Wolff is not just willing to lay bare his pretenses and self-deceptions; he feels an obligation to do so. Like Rumpelstilskin, he has spun experience, memory, and a remarkable gift for storytelling into literary gold.

Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, Wolff barely knew his largely absent father, a man he and his older brother Geoffrey (also a writer) have described as a con artist and a compulsive liar. While he was still young, Wolff's parents officially split up. Geoffrey went to live with his father; Tobias stayed with his mother, who moved around from state to state in a steady, westerly progression that finally landed them in Washington. Never a good judge of character where men were concerned, his mother married an abusive martinet who made her son's life miserable. Wolff recounted his misspent, miserable youth in This Boy's Life, a groundbreaking 1989 memoir that later became a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Barkin, and Robert De Niro.

Wolfe escaped his troubled home environment by falsifying an application to a private boys' school in the East and fabricating a resumé so remarkable it got him in. He flunked out before graduating, enlisted in the military, and was sent to Vietnam -- an experience he chronicled in a second memoir, In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War, published in 1994. When he was discharged from service, he visited England, fell in love with the country, and studied, with the help of tutors, to gain entrance to Oxford. He graduated with honors in 1972 and received a scholarship to Stanford, where he received his master's degree.

A three-time winner of the O. Henry Award, Wolff is widely respected for his short stories. His first collection, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, was published in 1981 and received rave reviews from such past masters of the genre as Annie Dillard and Joyce Carol Oates. Subsequent anthologies have only served to solidify his reputation as a preternaturally gifted storyteller. His 1984 novella The Barracks Thief won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; and in 2003, he published his first novel, Old School, a shrewdly observed, heavily autobiographical coming-of-age tale set in an elite boys' boarding school.

Nearly as famous for his teaching as for his books, Wolff served on the faculty of Syracuse University for 17 years before accepting a position at Stanford in 1997 as a professor of English literature and creative writing. He is also a crackerjack editor and has shepherded several short story anthologies through to publication.

Good To Know

  • Leonardo DiCaprio beat out 400 hopefuls from Los Angeles, New York, Florida, and all places in between to star as Tobias Wolff in the film version of This Boy's Life.

  • Separated at a young age by their parent's divorce, Tobias and Geoffrey Wolff both grew up to become successful writers. Geoffrey's 1979 memoir of life with his con-artist father is called The Duke of Deception.

  • In an interview with The Boston Book Review, Tobias Wolfe discussed the phenomenon of selective memory this way: " Memory is something that you do; it is not something that you have. You remember, and when you remember you bring in all the resources of invention, calculation, self-interest and self-protection. Imagination is part of it too."
      1. Also Known As:
        Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff (full name)
      2. Hometown:
        Northern California
      1. Date of Birth:
        June 19, 1945
      2. Place of Birth:
        Birmingham, Alabama
      1. Education:
        B.A., Oxford University, 1972; M.A., Stanford University, 1975

    Read an Excerpt

    Fortune


    Our car boiled over again just after my mother and I crossed the Continental Divide. While we were waiting for it to cool we heard, from somewhere above us, the bawling of an airhorn. The sound got louder and then a big truck came around the comer and shot past us into the next curve, its trailer shimmying wildly. We stared after it. "Oh, Toby," my mother said, "he's lost his brakes."

    The sound of the hom grew distant, then faded in the wind that sighed in the trees all around us.

    By the time we got there, quite a few people were standing along the cliff where the truck went over. It had smashed through the guardrails and fallen hundreds of feet through empty space to the river below, where it lay on its back among the boulders. It looked pitifully small. A stream of thick black smoke rose from the cab, feathering out in the wind. My mother asked whether anyone had gone to report the accident. Someone had. We stood with the others at the cliff's edge. Nobody spoke. My mother put her arm around my shoulder.

    For the rest of the day she kept looking over at me, touching me, brushing back my hair. I saw that the time was right to make a play for souvenirs. I knew she bad no money for them, and I had tried not to ask, but now that her guard was down I couldn't help myself. When we pulled out of Grand junction I owned a beaded Indian belt, beaded moccasins, and a bronze horse with a removable, tooled-leather saddle.


    It was 1955 and we were driving from Florida to Utah, to get away from a man my mother was afraid of and to get rich on uranium. We were going to change our luck.

    We'd left Sarasota in the dead ofsummer, right after my tenth birthday, and beaded West under low flickering skies that turned black and exploded and cleared just long enough to leave the air gauzy with steam. We drove through Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, stopping to cool the engine in towns where people moved with arthritic slowness and spoke in thick, strangled tongues. Idlers with rotten teeth surrounded the car to press peanuts on the pretty Yankee lady and her little boy, arguing among themselves about shortcuts. Women looked up from their flower beds as we drove past, or watched us from their porches, sometimes impassively, sometimes giving us a nod and a flutter of their fans.

    Every couple of hours the Nash Rambler boiled over. My mother kept digging into her little grubstake but no mechanic could fix it. All we could do was wait for it to cool, then drive on until it boiled over again. (My mother came to bate this machine so much that not long after we got to Utah she gave it away to a woman she met in a cafeteria.) At night we slept in boggy rooms where headlight beams crawled up and down the walls and mosquitoes sang in our ears, incessant as the tires whining on the highway outside. But none of this bothered me. I was caught up in my mother's freedom, her delight in her freedom, her dream of transformation.

    Everything was going to change when we got out West. My mother had been a girl in Beverly Hills, and the life we saw ahead of us was conjured from her memories of California in the days before the Crash. Her father, Daddy as she called him, had been a navy officer and a paper millionaire. They'd lived in a big house with a turret. Just before Daddy lost all his money and all his shanty-Irish relatives' money and got himself transferred overseas, my mother was one of four girls chosen to ride on the Beverly Hills float in the Tournament of Roses. The float's theme was "The End of the Rainbow" and it won that year's prize by acclamation. She met Jackie Coogan. She had her picture taken with Harold Lloyd and Marion Davies, whose movie The Sailor Man was filmed on Daddy's ship. When Daddy was at sea she and her mother lived a dream life in which, for days at a time, they played the part of sisters.

    And the cars my mother told me about as we waited for the Rambler to cool--I should have seen the cars! Daddy drove a Franklin touring car. She'd been courted by a boy who bad his own Chrysler convertible with a musical horn. And of course there was the Hernandez family, neighbors who'd moved up from Mexico after finding oil under their cactus ranch. The family was large. When they were expected to appear somewhere together they drove singly in a caravan of identical Pierce-Arrows.

    Something like that was supposed to happen to us. People in Utah were getting up poor in the morning and going to bed rich at night. You didn't need to be a mining engineer or a mineralogist. All you needed was a Geiger counter. We were on our way to the uranium fields, where my mother would get a job and keep her eyes open. Once she learned the ropes she'd start prospecting for a claim of her own.

    And when she found it she planned to do some serious compensating: for the years of hard work, first as a soda jerk and then as a novice secretary, that had gotten her no farther than flat broke and sometimes not that far. For the breakup of our family five years earlier. For the misery of her long affair with a violent man. She was going to make up for lost time, and I was going to help her.

    Customer Reviews

    Average Rating 4.5
    ( 38 )

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    See All Sort by: Showing 1 – 20 of 39 Customer Reviews

    • Anonymous

      Posted December 16, 2001

      This Boy's Life: Two Thumbs Up

      Living in a dysfunctional family in the 1950s and 1960s isn¿t easy. Tobias Wolff¿s novel This Boy¿s Life is a moving tale of the frustrations of young Toby, constantly on the move with his mother, Rosemary, to avoid his violent father. They travel from Florida to Utah to Washington in hope of a better life; but what they really find is that they are no better off when they were back in Florida. Throughout the novel, Toby struggles in finding his own identity and pretends to be what other people want him to be. Because of this, Toby starts to steal and lie to find friends and fit in. He tries to make his mother happy by being the person she wants him to be. In doing so, he loses sight of his own identity. But his mother sees his problem as a lack of a fatherly figure and tries to appease him by marring a man named Dwight, who turns out to be an abusive drunk and a liar. Toby¿s strategies to avoid Dwight¿running away to Alaska, forging checks, stealing cars¿lead Toby to believe in the possibilities of escaping to a new world. This Boy¿s Life is truly a novel that will catch anyone¿s attention. Although the book can be read fairly easy, many people can relate to the struggles of adversity, which makes this novel so powerful. Wolff does a remarkable job of creating the frustrations and the cruelties of adolescence. The humor combined with the seriousness makes the reader have a new outlook on life, and how fortunate some of us are to have it. Overall, this book rates five stars and should be a part of everyone¿s book list.

      2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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    • Anonymous

      Posted March 25, 2012

      Incredible

      I havrnt relly read the book but the movie is so touching im 13 year old girl i cried during the movie its so touching and sympathetic

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    • Posted December 26, 2011

      wonderful

      I've read this 3 or 4 times--and I rarely reread books. Such a rich a warm memoir. If you haven't read, you are in for a treat!

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    • Anonymous

      Posted March 5, 2011

      not a gentle childhood

      tough and difficult story told with obvious honesty

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    • Posted January 28, 2010

      I Also Recommend:

      9780679727521

      Great Memoir

      I was surprised to enjoy this book as much as I did. I picked it up a few times, read the first few sentences and put it back down, which usually isn't a good sign. But after reading it in its entirety, I found This Boy's Life a great read. It's tough, realistic, and not overly sentimental.

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    • Anonymous

      Posted May 21, 2006

      A Great Read

      I enjoyed every page of Wolff's memoir. As I read the book I connected with a lot of what Wolff was describing as he was younger. The diction that Wolff used made it really easy to understand him, but the things he writes about make the book anything but simple. I felt that Wolff used understatement wonderfully in his story. I never thought that the good times were all that good, and the bad times never seemed too terrible. At times, I even felt myself feeling sympathetic to Toby¿s drunken, abusive stepfather. This is a great book for anyone that is looking for a quick, engaging read.

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    • Anonymous

      Posted August 11, 2004

      BEST BOOK EVER!

      this was an awesome book. one of the best i have ever read. anyone who wants a good book to read should read this one. its really good.

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    • Anonymous

      Posted June 1, 2004

      The greats book I ever read.

      This boys life was a great book to read as a teenager. It absolutly fasnated me in all kinds of ways. If you haven't read this book yet I suggest you go get it and read it.It is my faorite book of all time to this day.

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    • Anonymous

      Posted May 18, 2003

      A near-perfect memoir

      Wolff writes with painfully truthful and accurate prose. A Boy's Life is one of those rare books that educate, inspire, and stay with you for years.

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    • Anonymous

      Posted March 24, 2003

      A good Movie also.

      I wanted to read This Boys life but I only got to see the movie. Which is great!! In the movie Dwight almost chokes Toby to death!! But luckly his mother comes through for him. The ending was weak, but still it was a great movie!

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    • Anonymous

      Posted March 21, 2003

      A MUST READ BOOK FOR EVERY GROWING TEEN

      During high school, I was recommended to read this book for my class and like all class readings I usually skimmed it. However, Tobias Wolf's writings won me over and I read his book cover to cover. It's an emotional rollcoaster of humor, sadness and pure determination. What make this book so intereesting is that Wolf presents his life story in a format as if he is explaining it as if he was the young Toby; an excellent writing technique. As a result, this makes the reader feel as though he is taking the jounrey with young Toby. Even during college, I found myself wanting to read this book every year and it never seemed to lose its lustier.

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    • Anonymous

      Posted October 4, 2002

      A Good Essay Book

      This book was a very excellent book to read. It is a fast reading book, I read it in 2 days. I ended up getting an A on my Summer Reading Book Essay on this book. It is easy to understanding all the key points in it and how young Tobias matures. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate this book at a 10!

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    • Anonymous

      Posted September 2, 2002

      This Boy's Life

      I was required to read this book for school, and I thought it was an okay book. Not Outstanding or Horrible. Just Okay. It tells of Toby's adolescence.

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    • Anonymous

      Posted June 26, 2002

      An outstanding book

      This book was really good. i enjoyed it. i had to read it for the summer for school and it was great. Wolff did an awesome job writing this book and anybody would enjoy this book. I would recommend this to anyone, so go to your nearest library or bookstore and read it. its 285 pgs but you will get into it so much that you wont even notice the pages because its that interesting. Enjoy reading!

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    • Anonymous

      Posted January 18, 2002

      A Memoir

      'This Boys Life' by Tobias Wolff tells about the authors boy-hood and the struggles he went through to gain self-respect. Toby is a cunning, non-racial youth. The novel is a great coming of age book.

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    • Anonymous

      Posted May 24, 2001

      Emotional!!!!!!

      I've read this book like three times, and it gets better everytime. It is extremely emotional, and definitly must read. The movie is great too.

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    • Anonymous

      Posted February 18, 2001

      Must Read!!!!

      A quick, funny, and enjoyable read. This story reminds you of how great it was to get into and out of trouble. Any kid who has lived a troublesome childhood or would just like to enjoy someone elses must pick this book up.

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    • Anonymous

      Posted November 27, 2011

      No text was provided for this review.

    • Anonymous

      Posted February 8, 2011

      No text was provided for this review.

    • Anonymous

      Posted September 9, 2009

      No text was provided for this review.

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