This Boy's Life

Celebrated author and Stanford professor Tobias Wolff recounts his perilous teenage years in the 1950s Pacific Northwest. Clever, conniving Toby (self-named Jack Wolff) will do whatever it takes to reinvent himself in a memoir full of larger-than-life characters, thrilling events, emotional rollercoasters of betrayals, broken dreams, and hard-won triumphs, all conveyed in prose so lucid that the book has been college assigned for its poetic honesty at the sentence level for decades. Guaranteed you’ll be floored by what it takes for Wolff to ultimately transcend the merciless circumstances of his life. 

I admire this book because the teen character is deeply honest with how he describes the difficult, contentious world around him, and the world within him. He gets it, and he uses the language in a plain prose style that lets the voice, the action, the images, and the drama hit home inside the reader. Once you enter this book, and are captured by the beauty and authenticity, then you can’t put it down because it holds a mirror up to your own interior life.