He kept a Camel burning on his lower lip. Now and then his expression changed, and he grunted as if to claim some point of argument. When I spoke he answered curtly or not at all. It’s a rough one, without the abject poverty of Walls’, but without the intermittent glimmers of love and joy, too.ĭwight drove in a sullen reverie. Like Walls and other memoirists, he presents a portrait of his childhood, one that we are supposed to read as more or less true. And Tobias the author doesn’t paint his younger self in a flattering light. So his deliquency is his survival mechanism. He is sympathetic in that he has to endure two abusive father-ish figures in a row: Roy, then Dwight, who becomes Toby’s stepfather. Where Jeannette was a sympathetic narrator, though, Toby/Jack is not. Interestingly, she shares this tendency and a name with Jeannette Walls’ mother, so there was an interesting fun-house mirror effect to reading these books one after the other. The mother, Rosemary, has a penchant for getting up and going. Toby, or Jack, since he changes his name within the book, lives in the west with his mother, who is divorced from his dad, who lives out east with their son Geoffrey. I am far, far from whenever that suggestion came, and perhaps it would have been more timely then, but it seemed timely enough, coming on the heels of my finishing, liking and appreciating Jeannette Walls’ childhood memoir The Glass Castle.Īlso, since you may be wondering, it was adapted into a movie with Ellen Barkin, Robert DeNiro and Leo DiCaprio. This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff was recommended to me a while ago on one of The Morning News Biblioracle events, where I listed the last five books I read, and John Warner offered a suggestion for the next.
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