Synopses & Reviews
First published in 1967, Stop-Time was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of modern American autobiography, a brilliant portrayal of one boy's passage from childhood to adolescence and beyond. Here is Frank Conroy's wry, sad, beautiful tale of life on the road; of odd jobs and lost friendships, brutal schools and first loves; of a father's early death and a son's exhilarating escape into manhood. Stop-Time is as generous on the subject of growing up lost in America, as moving in its absolute intelligence and compassion, as anywork that has appeared before or since.
Review
"Stop-Time is unique, an autobiography with the intimate unprotected candor of a novel. What makes it special, however, is the style, dry as an etching, sparse, elegant, modest, cheerful. Conroy has that subtle sense of the proportion of things which one usually finds only in established writers just after the mellowing of their career." Norman Mailer
Synopsis
Conroy's classic memoir of his boyhood: his brutal experimental boarding school; a sojourn in the mental institution where his mother was a warden; his neurotic father's abandonment, mad mistress, and eventual death; and Frank's final escape into relative normalcy.
Table of Contents
Stop-Time Prologue
1. Savages
2. Space and a Dead Mule
3. Going North
4. White Days and Red Nights
5. Hate, and a Kind of Music
6. Please Don't Take My Sunshine Away
7. Shit
8. A Yo-Yo Going Down, A Mad Squirrel Coming Up
9. Falling
10. The Coldness of Public Places
11. Blindman's Buff
12. Nights Away from Home
13. Death by Itself
14. License to Drive
15. Hanging On
16. Losing My Cherry
17. Going to Sea
18. Elsinore, 1953
19. The Lock on the Metro Door
20. Unambiguous Events
Epilogue