This Boy’s Life is a memoir of a few years in the life of Tobias Wolff.  It is a well constructed story with no wasted words and details how hard it must have been for him growing up.  His parents divorced relatively early on and his mother (Rosemary) wandered looking for a place to stay and looking for a man in their lives. Bear in mind this is 1950s America where it was thought every boy needed a father figure in their lives.

His father was profligate, made up stories about himself and changed his name according to what he needed it to be and Wolff was no different. In order to get into a ‘good’ school he created a persona for himself, then he created school reports and referrals to fit that persona, he also embellished his name to Tobias Jonathan von Ansell-Wolff, III.

His mother was not good at picking men. Her father was a bully and she seemed to only be able to pick men like that.  She eventually married Dwight who she thought was a good pick but he ended up being worse than any other man.  He bullied Wolff both physically and emotionally making things challenging for him.

It’s certainly an interesting read, I probably would have read it even without having it as a text as I like memoirs. Wolff is a very good writer, very skilled and you can see where he got some of his skills.  At school he helped other boys with their writing, even doing some of their essays for them. He made up stories about what he’d done and went into quite some detail making sure to get the finer points correct.

Wolff was in the Scouting fraternity although this didn’t make him a paragon of virtue. He was in trouble (or should have been in trouble) far too often and he doesn’t pull any punches in detailing many of these incidents in this volume.

This memoir was made into a film in 1993 with Robert de Niro as Dwight and Leonardo diCaprio as Wolff. We saw a little of the movie in class and it was quite powerful.

Warnings: swearing, violence and boys being boys and talking about sex.