Who am I?
I’ve lived this theme—my father died just before I turned three years old and I’ve been haunted by his death ever since, especially during my growing up. It’s informed everything I’ve ever written, including an essay I wrote for The New York Times Magazine which they ranked in 2017 as one of their 16 all-time best Lives columns.
Austin's book list on coming-of-age novels that feature loss
Why did Austin love this book?
When I was in college, I told my writing teacher I wanted to write about my father’s death, which had happened when I was very little. My teacher, a famous writer, lost his father when he was very little too, but he told me he never wrote about it directly. I looked for examples in literature of someone writing autobiographically about a loss in early childhood and I only ever found one: Tolstoy’s debut novel, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. Tolstoy’s mother died when he was 2, his father when he was 8, and he writes about it with unparalleled power across his oeuvre, but never so directly and autobiographically as in Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. He made it OK for me to write my own autobiographical novel about childhood loss.
1 author picked Childhood, Boyhood, Youth as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Leo Tolstoy began his trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, in his early twenties. Although he would in his old age famously dismiss it as an 'awkward mixture of fact and fiction', generations of readers have not agreed, finding the novel to be a charming and insightful portrait of inner growth against the background of a world limned with extraordinary clarity, grace and colour. Evident too in its brilliant account of a young person's emerging awareness of the world and of his place within it are many of the stances, techniques and themes that would come to full flower in the immortal…