This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff

I love memoirs. Maybe I shouldn't admit to that so readily, in the same way you don't easily confess to rushing home every day to watch Oprah. But I can't help it; I do. This confessional mode satisfies some essential part of the human psyche, the part that keeps us craning our necks at car accidents on the expressway. I want to know: What is your experience? What can it teach me about mine? The problem with most memoirs, however, is that they sour at some point, turning unbearable preachy and bombastic.

This Boy's Life has all the sensational elements of a page-turner: a poor upbringing, a drunken and abusive stepfather, delinquent adolescent behavior, and even some homoeroticism. Of course, it's not the story for which we should commend Wolff, as it is not fiction (though perhaps fictionalized), but the way he tells it. In line with Wolff's oeuvre, This Boy's Life is really a collection of short stories. These stories are like snapshots tucked in a family album, more in the order that someone remembered to paste them there than when they were taken. Wolff does not commit the cardinal error of memoir writing: pretending he recalls more than he did, or was aware of more than he was at the time. He resists retrospective analysis, steeping readers in the muddle of his adolescence just as he experienced it.

All memoirs should aspire to be like Wolff's. After all, these snapshots are all we ever have from which to view a life. And from them one can more easily achieve the purpose of memoir writing: the sense of shared experience. I may not have had an abusive stepfather or have grown up in a boarding house, but I do remember having a (toy) gun from which I wouldn't be separated and the (apparent) ingenuity to fudge school documents. Because of these congruities, I can connect with This Boy's Life and I'm sure others can, too, though their points of entry may differ. Wolff's humility in letting us see him as a child, and thereby see ourselves as children, rather than an older, wiser adult saves This Boy's Life from the fate that gives all memoirs a bad rap. Give it a good read before you turn your back on the genre forever.