Book summary

Tobias Wolff's dark and eccentric memoir about growing up rebellious in the 1950s is a funny, heartbreaking portrait of a vulnerable boy trying desperately to keep things together as he and his skittish mother travel aimlessly around the US, avoiding the violent lover she left behind. Finally settling in the Pacific Northwest when she marries Dwight--one of literature's most unforgettably abusive stepfathers--young Toby resorts to lies and subterfuge in order to survive and, ultimately, to escape. Wolff's bleakly hilarious narrative, published in 1989, has been justly praised as an outstanding example of the memoir genre, and was made into a 1993 movie with Leonardo Di Caprio, Ellen Barkin, and Robert De Niro.