This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolfe

Years ago, a parent came into my classroom and handed out fliers for his missing kid. Now this guy was big and intimidating, and he was clearly very angry, so I thought to myself “okay, he’s pissed off that his kid’s run away.” Not unreasonable, it can be stressful tracking down a runaway. But if he really wanted to find the boy, why did he give me such a blurry photo?

Tobias Wolfe’s memoir was no surprise to me. I can’t even say “shocked but not surprised” but I was neither shocked nor surprised. I’ve seen families where the father is an abusive drill sergeant and the mother is completely spineless. The kids always end up angry, sometimes getting into mischief. But This Boy’s Life takes place in the early 60’s, and not only was Tobias (he calls himself “Jack” in his youth) dealing with a brute stepfather and coward of a mother, but he was also dealing with a lack of rights. It was an era when a man wouldn’t get jail time for beating his stepson and stealing the kid’s money.

The plot isn’t complicated; parents split, father keeps the older brother, mother takes “Jack” to Utah, then Washington State, hooks up with a brute named Dwight, things get rough. But there’s no self-indulgence here, no self-pity or “I had a horrible life” attitude. I expect that after living a life where you can’t rely on adult authority figures, you learn to do more on your own. And he definitely does a lot on his own; paper routes, work, forging his report card so he can get into boarding school. He does it all by himself. When he finds out that his stepfather has stolen his money, he makes one last dash to get revenge; he sneaks back into the house, steals Dwight’s guns, and pawns them. This had to be the best part of the book.

Back when I was 13, I was in a bible study class and we got to the part where the Jews say “let’s go back to Egypt, I miss the food, I miss the melons, I miss the onions.” The teacher said to us “we learn a lesson here, don’t dream of the past, it was never as good as you remember.” When I disagreed, he said “Ben, we didn’t have to lock our doors when I was your age, because we had nothing to steal!” As for this book, maybe the message is “the past sucks” and we shouldn’t look back? Perhaps this book is an anti-tribute to the Eisenhower-Kennedy era? It certainly makes life in the 50’s and 60’s look horrible; women had no rights, kids had no rights, men controlled the family finances, kids had no advocates, nobody ever believed a kid who said he was being abused.

This is why I never believed Michael Jackson when he said “I was robbed of my childhood.” I would say “childhood sucks Michael, you didn’t miss anything!”