Word: memoire
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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THIS BOY'S LIFE by Tobias Wolff (Atlantic Monthly Press; $18.95). This memoir by a highly praised author in his early 40s evokes the bizarre details of his upbringing, dwelling not on hardships but on the promise of awakening every morning in a vast land where people are prepared to forget the past and believe anything...
This Boy's Life proves good enough to be unforgettable. Tobias Wolff, 43, is the author of two collections of stories and The Barracks Thief (1984), a critically acclaimed novella. He is also the younger brother of Geoffrey Wolff, whose own memoir, The Duke of Deception (1979), introduced tens of thousands of readers to the bizarre saga of the Wolff family. Although these two narratives have kinship and blood in common, they spring from dissimilar circumstances. The parents split up when the brothers were young. Geoffrey stayed east with his flamboyantly fraudulent father; Tobias drifted west with his mother...
PASSION AND PREJUDICE: A FAMILY MEMOIR...
Like many skilled writers, she sacrifices balance for effects. This is acceptable, even necessary, in fiction. But in a memoir whose purpose is to expose one's own family in the glare of a social ideology, the practice seems simplistic and self-serving. There is, for example, her use of the familiar tale about the founding of the Bingham fortune. Grandfather Robert, "the Judge," bought into Louisville publishing with money from the estate of Mary Lily Flagler, his second wife. The Judge was rumored to have killed Mary Lily, but there was never any evidence that would support a criminal...
...REVOIR LES ENFANTS Tragedy awaits, irony abounds in this memoir of friendship and betrayal in a boarding school during World War II. Without italicizing a single emotion, French director Louis Malle has created the year's strongest indictment of the totalitarian mind and the conformist soul...