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This Boy's Life

Written by:
Tobias Wolff
Narrated by:
Oliver Wyman

Unabridged Audiobook

Ratings
Book
28
Narrator
9
Release Date
July 27, 2010
Duration
10 hours 4 minutes
Summary
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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Paul S.

Though this book is a memoir, it feels like a fictional novel. The author's talent is in his extractions, the way he distills big philosophies down to succinct, cutting sentences while avoiding pretentiousness or unoriginality. I've always thought an author's primary job is to do just that, to be a filter through which reality is sieved, to make order emerge from chaos and then set out to define it. Tobias Wolff applied this to his own life, something that, after reading this book, if you're like me, you'll wish you could do as effectively and truthfully with yourself. The depth of honesty in his self-reckoning is a thing to admire and aspire to. There appears in these pages no space for deception, and you're brought through scenes of almost tragic miscues and then the bungling efforts to morally reconcile the wrongs against the idea of innocence and the victim's own imperfect responses. The author never seems pathetic or to beg for mercy or forgiveness. The slate he chose to tell us his history is frightfully clean and open, allows no posturing, and seems almost too honest, as if you're listening in on someone's confession, though the sins he's guilty of seem to a certain degree tame these days. Wolff pulls from all of these moments the deeper truths embedded there. It's a refreshingly insightful read/listen. The narrator was just right.

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