Tobias Wolff: This Boy’s Life

One of the first books within a huge movement that restored respectability to memoirs, This Boy’s Life celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, and Tobias Wolff celebrates thirty years since being on Bookworm. Honest and readable writing, This Boy’s Life makes its way from beginning to end not as if a memoir, but as if life itself is the adventure we hope for, the making of a writer: a mother’s divorce, a terrifying first stepfather, an escape from home to a thoroughly-unprepared-for prep school; the details of a childhood turned desperate. Wolff says that one can never know what sort of life a book will have.