The Boys of My Youth - by Jo Ann Beard (Paperback)

About the Book

Beard writes with perfect pitch as she takes readers through one woman's life--from childhood to marriage and beyond--to memorably capture the collision of youthful longing and the hard realities of time and fate.

Book 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

Review Quotes

"Beard remembers (or imagines) her childhood self with an uncanny lucidity that startles."--Laura Miller, New York Times Book Review

"Extraordinary...Beard is writing not with the romanticism of a girl looking up at the stars, but with the brilliant cold light of the stars looking down on us."--Ted Anton, Chicago Tribune

"Smart, funny, and moving...A gifted and gutsy writer...This is what a first collection of stories should be."--Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe

About the Author

Jo Ann Beard is also the author of the novel In Zanesville. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and Best American Essays. She has received a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.