This Boy's Life

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This Boy's Life (ISBN 0802136680) is a memoir by Tobias Wolff first published in 1989. It describes the author's adolescence as he wanders the continental United States with his itinerant mother. The first leg of their journey takes them from Florida to Utah, where Mom, fleeing an abusive partner, hopes to get rich quick finding uranium (they don't). Eventually Mom hooks up with Dwight Hansen (see below), and they settle in Concrete, Washington, north of Seattle, a place of natural beauty and, in their case, more than its share of personal desolation.

Much of the book concerns the author's relationship with Dwight, his brutish and stupid stepfather. Besides abusing his stepson for misdeeds both real (like rolling the purloined family car into a ditch) and trumped-up (like discarding an empty mustard jar that, according to Dwight's claim, was not empty enough to be disposed of), Dwight engages in bizarre activities like painting everything in the house, including the piano and its white keys (too yellowish) bright "eye-frying" white.

Mom insulates herself from the unhappiness of her home by campaigning extensively for John F Kennedy.

The author engineers an escape for himself by gaining admission to The Hill School with a largely fabricated application (the author's first great work of fiction, if you will). He would eventually fail out of the school and serve in the Vietnam war; some of his experiences as a soldier are recorded in a second memoir, In Pharaoh's Army.

The book is distinguished by the nonjudgmental tone of the narrative voice, and the defenseless way in which the author presents his own delinquent exploits. It is also marked by its uncluttered, lyrical language.

The book's first paragraph is as follows:

'Our car boiled over again just after my mother and I crossed the Continental Divide. While we were waiting for it to cool we heard, from somewhere above us, the bawling of an airhorn. The sound got louder and then a big truck came around the corner and shot past us into the next curve, its trailer shimmying wildly. We stared after it. "Oh, Toby," my mother said, "he's lost his brakes."'

The 1993 film drama This Boy's Life starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Ellen Barkin, playing the roles of the narrator, Dwight, and the narrator's mother, respectively. It also features Chris Cooper in a small role, years before appearances in American Beauty and Adaptation., among other films, would make him famous.