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What it argues
Tobias Wolff's memoir of his childhood in the 1950s, moving with his peripatetic mother from Florida to Utah to Seattle to the logging town of Concrete, Washington, is one of the finest examples of what might be called the stepfather memoir — a genre that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as writers processed childhoods marked by violence, instability, and the particular powerlessness of being a child under an adult's authority. This Boy's Life is distinguished from that genre by Wolff's refusal to make himself simply a victim.
The memoir opens with Toby (as Wolff called himself as a boy) and his mother Rosemary fleeing from a violent boyfriend in Florida, heading west. Wolff's portrait of Rosemary is generous and clear-eyed: she is warm, funny, independent, and constitutionally incapable of recognizing predators before she has already committed herself to them. She marries Dwight, a mechanic in Concrete who proves to be controlling, sadistic, and petty in the specific way that small men with domestic authority can be. The Dwight chapters are the memoir's core — a portrait of low-grade sustained cruelty that is recognized as abuse only slowly and retrospectively, because it comes without dramatic single incidents.
What it gets right
- 1.
Abuse does not require dramatic episodes to be real. Dwight's cruelty is cumulative and low-grade — a sustained atmosphere of belittlement and control — which the memoir renders more honestly than theatrical violence would.
- 2.
Children's self-invention is both survival and moral liability. Wolff's chronic lying is what eventually gets him out of Concrete, and the memoir refuses to simply condemn it.
- 3.
The mother's vulnerability to abusive partners is rendered with compassion rather than judgment. Understanding her choices does not require excusing them.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Tobias Wolff was born in 1945 in Birmingham, Alabama, and served as a paratrooper and special forces soldier in Vietnam before studying at Oxford and Stanford. He is the author of three short story collections, two novellas, a Vietnam memoir (In Pharaoh's Army), and This Boy's Life. He taught for many years at Stanford University and is considered one of the preeminent practitioners of the American short story. His fiction and his memoirs share a compressed, morally precise style that has influenced several generations of American writers.
