Key themes
- The father you needed and the stepfather you got
- Self-invention as both survival and self-deception
- The memoir as reckoning — writing yourself out of what you were
About this book
Tobias Wolff's memoir of his adolescence in 1950s America — moving with his mother from town to town, enduring a cruel stepfather named Dwight, petty criminality and an elaborate scheme to escape to a school he has no right to attend. A foundational American memoir and a study in the complicated relationship between the person you were and the writer you became.
Published in 1989, This Boy's Life won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and is one of the canonical American memoirs. It was adapted into a film with Robert De Niro as Dwight and Leonardo DiCaprio as Toby.
Discussion questions
- Dwight is one of memoir's great monsters — petty, cruel and specifically skilled at undermining a boy's self-image. How does Wolff show the mechanics of this psychological abuse?
- The young Tobias consistently lies, steals and manipulates to survive and escape. How does the adult Wolff present this younger self — with sympathy, judgment or something harder to categorise?
- The memoir ends with Wolff's escape to a school he gained entry to through a forged application. How does he present this act of self-invention — as dishonest, as necessary, or as the first authentic thing he does?
- Wolff is also a celebrated fiction writer. How does the novelist's craft show in the memoir — and does this literary shaping of memory raise questions about what is being told?
- This Boy's Life has been compared to Angela's Ashes and A Small Place as an account of childhood poverty and cruelty. What do these accounts share — and what does each offer that the others cannot?
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