The Boys of My Youth

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By Jo Ann Beard

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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

  • "Smart, funny, and moving...A gifted and gutsy writer...This is what a first collection of stories should be."
    Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe
  • "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
  • "Beard remembers (or imagines) her childhood self with an uncanny lucidity that startles."
    Laura Miller, New York Times Book Review

On Sale
Jan 29, 1999
Page Count
224 pages
Publisher
Back Bay Books
ISBN-13
9780316085250

Jo Ann Beard

About the Author

Jo Ann Beard is the author of the groundbreaking collection of autobiographical essays, The Boys of My Youth, and the novel, In Zanesville. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and other magazines and anthologies. She has received a Whiting Foundation Award and nonfiction fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2022, she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters 2022 Award in Literature. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

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