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This Boy's Life: A Memoir cover

This Boy's Life: A Memoir

Tobias Wolff

#663 of 3,809 books · #282 in Biography & Memoir

Won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography (1989). Also shortlisted or longlisted for 1 other award.

This Boy's Life won the PEN/Faulkner Award. Tobias Wolff recounts coming of age in 1950s Washington State with his mother and abusive stepfather in this classic memoir. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the move. As he fights for identity and self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of a new stepfather, his experiences are at once poignant and comical, and Wolff masterfully re-creates the frustrations, cruelties, and joys of adolescence. His various schemes—running away to Alaska, forging checks, and stealing cars—lead eventually to an act of outrageous self-invention that releases him into a new world of possibility.

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Publisher
Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN-13
9780802198600
Topics
Coming of ageFamily and abuse1950s America