SOURCE: Dyer, Geoff. “Toby Runs Wild.” New Statesman and Society 2, no. 47 (28 April 1989): 44.

In the following review, Dyer admires Wolff's sense of timing, his eye for detail, and his linguistic precision in This Boy's Life.

Insofar as generic judgments are possible the memoir is the lowest form of literary life, undertaken typically either by the Stephen Spenders of this world (that is by those who, though almost talentless, find themselves in proximity to abundant talent) or by those who can't think how else to set about writing (not everyone has a novel in them but everyone has a memoir). Prone to recollect rather than re-create, the memoirist suffers a serial compulsion to overuse one word: “would”—we would do this, then we'd do that, on Sundays we'd do something else. A wooden word, “would”, inimical to the creation of interesting sentences or vivid scenes and one which any novelist...