Recommendations
Books Like This Boy's Life
Best books to read after This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff
This Boy's Life showed that a memoir could be as rigorously crafted as a short story and as honest as a deposition. These 8 books share its unflinching account of a difficult childhood, its complicated relationship with the past, and its belief that the act of writing is itself a form of surviving.
- 1Buy
The Liar's Club
by Mary Karr
Karr's 1995 memoir of growing up in a chaotic East Texas family is the closest companion to This Boy's Life in the American memoir tradition: both books were foundational to the memoir revival of the 1990s, both describe childhoods defined by an unstable and sometimes violent adult male, and both use the precision and structure of fiction to give the memoir the quality of literature.
- 2Buy
Angela's Ashes
by Frank McCourt
McCourt's 1996 Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of growing up in poverty in Limerick — with a charming alcoholic father who cannot keep the family fed — is the most widely read companion to This Boy's Life in the 1990s memoir revival: both books found a way to write about severely damaging childhoods with black humor, specific detail, and retrospective understanding.
- 3Buy
The Glass Castle
by Jeannette Walls
Walls's 2005 memoir of growing up with nomadic, neglectful parents shares This Boy's Life's portrait of children who love their damaged and damaging father even while understanding, retrospectively, what that love cost them — and the same retrospective clarity about a childhood that was, in its own way, complete.
- 4Buy
Educated
by Tara Westover
Westover's 2018 memoir of escaping a survivalist Idaho childhood to a Cambridge PhD shares This Boy's Life's central concern: the question of who has authority over the story of your own life — the adult survivors who did not witness it, the family members who dispute it, or the person who lived it.
- 5Buy
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith
Smith's 1943 novel about Francie Nolan growing up in poverty in Brooklyn is the fictional precursor to This Boy's Life: the same working-class family, the same complicated father-child relationship, the same insistence that the childhood you actually had is worth writing about, not the one you wished you had.
- 6Buy
A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
Yanagihara's 2015 novel about four college friends and the secret trauma that shapes Jude St. Francis's entire adult life is the fictional extreme of the territory that This Boy's Life explores in memoir: the question of how extreme childhood suffering reverberates through an entire life, and whether that life can be called one of survival or one of ongoing damage.
- 7Buy
In Pharaoh's Army
by Tobias Wolff
Wolff's 1994 memoir of his year as a military adviser in Vietnam — the next chapter in the same writer's life — shows how the boy of This Boy's Life became the man who served in Vietnam, and provides the full context of Wolff's autobiographical project.
- 8Buy
Running with Scissors
by Augusten Burroughs
Burroughs's 2002 memoir of being handed over by his mentally ill mother to her psychiatrist and growing up in the doctor's bizarre household is the most darkly comic companion to This Boy's Life in the genre of extreme childhood survival memoir — both books use dark humor to describe experiences that would otherwise be unreadable.
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