The Boys of My Youth - Jo Ann Beard

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. 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