Synopses & Reviews
Jo Ann Beard grew up amid a tightly knit clan of mothers, aunts, sisters, and girlfriends. Her steadfast family and its culture of women somehow made the prospect of dangerous neighborhood boys, friendly barflies, and potential romance all the more irresistible. But in these wonderfully engaging memory pieces, the boys of Beard's youth and the men who eventually replace them are elusive characters. Beloved boy dolls disintegrate, grade school crushes dissipate, and husbands disappear. The relationships that endure are the ones between women. Childhood dramas are balanced by actual tragedies and adult betrayals, and Beard captures the collision of youthful longing and the hard intransigences of time and fate like no other writer. In the title story, two old friends, stumbling away from ruined marriages, remember the darkest moments of abandonment, but also the thrilling momentum of a car doing ninety and the strange allure of teenage basketball players. In the end, they realize that in matters of the heart, nothing much, yet somehow everything, has changed.
Review
"Reading Jo Ann Beard's prose feels as comfortable as falling into step beside an old, intimate friend. She's the sort of writer whose charm lies in the voice...with which she relates the events of a mostly ordinary life.... Beard remembers (or imagines) her childhood self with an uncanny lucidity that startles." Laura Miller, New York Times Book Review
Review
"Beard is companionable, casual, serious about the things that matter without ever being self-serious, sharp without being cruel, compassionate without going soft. She accomplishes something with the personal essay that's similar to what Lee Smith or Jill McCorkle do in their fiction. Reading The Boys of My Youth is like going to a party or a barbecue where you hardly know a soul and winding up spending the entire time having a great conversation with someone you just met." Charles Taylor, Salon
Review
"These one-dimensional autobiographical fragments of girlhood, young adulthood, and a crumbling marriage are exercises in mere recollection, mostly lacking the narrative drive to make them worthwhile." Kirkus
Synopsis
The utterly compelling, uncommonly beautiful collection of personal essays (Newsweek) that established Jo Ann Beard as one of the leading writers of her generation. Cousins, mothers, sisters, dolls, dogs, best friends: these are the fixed points in Jo Ann Beard's universe, the constants that remain when the boys of her youth -- and then men who replace them -- are gone. This widely praised collection of autobiographical essays summons back, with astonishing grace and power, moments of childhood epiphany as well as the cataclysms of adult life: betrayal, divorce, death.
The Boys of My Youth heralded the arrival of an immensely gifted and influential writer and its essays remain surprising, original, and affecting today.
A luminous, funny, heartbreaking book of essays about life and its defining moments. --Harper's Bazaar
Synopsis
Rarely does the debut of a new writer garner such attention and acclaim. The excitement began the moment "The Fourth State of Matter," one of the fourteen extraordinary personal narratives in this book, appeared in the pages of the New Yorker. It increased when the author received a prestigious Whiting Foundation Award in November 1997, and it continued as the hardcover edition of The Boys of My Youth sold out its first printing even before publication. The author writes with perfect pitch as she takes us through one woman's life - from childhood to marriage and beyond - and memorably captures the collision of youthful longing and the hard intransigences of time and fate.