This Boy’s Life: A Memoir
Customer Review: Intriguing…
The memoir is intriguing. Any male who reads this can, at some point, relate to the follies, plunders, and disappointments Wolff encounters during his adolescence. It is explicit and candid making for an interesting read.
Customer Review: absorbing and painful with moments of comic relief
I’m about 2/3rds through this, and I find it entirely absorbing. Wolff’s writing talent is not in using fancy words or complex forms…just one sentence after another of perfectly pitched prose that feels entirely true and believable. He gains the reader’s trust and empathy early on and never loses them, even though, in my case, I wasn’t much interested in the details of his somewhat sordid and pathetic early years. I keep asking myself this holds my attention, while most memoirs by people I have a lot more in common with don’t. (Not to sound like a snob, but guns, dogs, smoking, drinking, etc. have never been my thing.) I think the reason is that his writing seems entirely transparent, plus you care about him. postscript: I’ve finished it now and towards the end I was increasingly pained by how f**ked up a person Wolff is–or was. It’s troubling and yet the writing is still transparent. You might say he gives us a God’s eye view: if there is a force that knows everything and can look at all our failings, faults and mistakes with simultaneous compassion and dispassion, then I think such a Being would write up Wolff’s early life in the way he himself wrote it. You get a feeling that there is no self-judging or constrictions and nothing to hide: just the truth, the all too human truth.
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