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This Boy's Life

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
First published in 1989, this memoir has become a classic in the genre. With this book, Wolff essentially launched the memoir craze that has been going strong ever since. It was made into a movie in 1993.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. The story is pretty grim: Teenaged Wolff moves with his divorced mother from Florida to Utah to Washington State to escape her violent boyfriend. 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. 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. Somber though this tale of family strife is, it is also darkly funny and so artistically satisfying that listeners come away exhilarated.
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    • AudioFile Magazine
      A young artist finds his voice in THIS BOY'S LIFE, and narrator Oliver Wyman reproduces his adolescent tone with remarkable verve and clarity. Tobias Wolff's 1989 memoir of his early life with his submissive mother and the violent men who either stalk her or marry her is strangely humorous and extraordinarily brave in its naked portrayal of abuse and conflict. Wyman captures the Wolff character's longing for normalcy in a universe that is topsy-turvy from what most young men experience growing up in America. Wolff the writer views Wolff the teenager with a distance that Wyman could have played for pity. Instead Wyman follows the author's lead and makes this story both moving and inspiring without being depressing. R.O. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 1, 1988
      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.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 29, 2010
      Wolff’s well-regarded 1989 chronicle of his difficult childhood and adolescence is already considered a contemporary classic, and an avatar—for better and for worse—of the current memoir frenzy. Wyman reads with a certain downturned tone, where each sentence drifts into a melancholy fog. Try as he might, Wyman cannot lift the funk that hangs over Wolff’s tale of youthful desperation and ambition, and ultimately adopts the book’s bittersweet, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone. Wyman collapses the distance between himself and the book’s narrator, so that we eventually come to mistake him for Wolff’s Toby. A Grove paperback.

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  • English

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