The End of Boys

A powerful memoir “about a difficult childhood . . . tough stuff, honest and real”—The Oregonian

Peter Hoffmeister was a nervous child who ran away repeatedly and bit his fingernails until they bled. Home-schooled until the age of fourteen, he had only to deal with his parents and siblings on a daily basis, yet even that sometimes proved too much for him.

Over the years, he watched his mother disintegrate into her own form of mania, while his father—a scholar and doctor who had once played ...