Reading Order
This Boy's Life Reading Order
Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989) is a memoir of growing up with a violent, controlling stepfather in Concrete, Washington, in the late 1950s and early 1960s — written with the precision and narrative structure of fiction and widely credited as one of the foundational works of the American memoir revival that preceded Mary Karr's The Liar's Club by six years.
Where to start
This Boy's Life
Complete This Boy's Life Book List
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This Boy's Life
Tobias Wolff·1989·The complete memoir. No sequels; Wolff's other books are fiction and a Vietnam memoir (In Pharaoh's Army). Start and finish here. - 2Buy
In Pharaoh's Army
Tobias Wolff·1994·Wolff's memoir of his year as a military adviser in Vietnam — a different life from the same writer, demonstrating the full range of his autobiographical writing.
This Boy's Life — Frequently Asked Questions
Is This Boy's Life based on a true story?
Yes — This Boy's Life is Tobias Wolff's memoir of his actual childhood. His stepfather, Dwight Wolff (the name is changed in the memoir), was a real person who disputed aspects of Wolff's account after the book was published. The memoir was adapted into a 1993 film directed by Michael Caton-Jones, with Robert De Niro as Dwight and Leonardo DiCaprio as the young Toby.
What is the significance of the title This Boy's Life?
The title refers both to the memoir's subject (the boy Wolff was, and the life he lived in Washington State in the late 1950s) and to a particular quality of boyhood — the sense of possibility and of narrative self-invention — that the memoir explores. Wolff describes the young Toby's constant reinvention of himself through lies and fantasies as a survival strategy, and the memoir traces how that habit of self-invention eventually became the writer's vocation.
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