Memoir

This Boy's Life
Author Tobias Wolf

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This is a deeply personal account of Wolf's life as a young boy growing up with a single mother and the close emotional bond between them. This bond becomes threatened when, out of fiscal necessity, she gets remarried to an abusive man. Rather than wallow in self-pity in his narrative, Wolf draws the reader into his storied childhood full of honest confessions of all the bad things he did as a mischievious youth and how these, along with other experiences, shaped who he became and the decisons he made. The backdrop for this story is the beautiful North Cascades.



Liar's Club
Author: Mary Karr

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In this the first of Karr's three memoirs she describes her childhood growing up in a dysfunctional family in Texas. There are a number of pivotal events in her young life, some of them difficult to read, but she has a way of drawing the reader into what seems like an unbelievable existence with colorful metaphor and lyrical composition that reflect her abilities as a poet as well as prose writer.