SOURCE: Bailey, Peter J. “‘Why Not Tell the Truth?’: The Autobiographies of Three Fiction Writers.” Critique 32, no. 4 (summer 1991): 219-21.

In the following excerpt, Bailey interprets This Boy's Life as a “meditation upon selfhood,” praising the style and narrative of the memoir.

Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life: A Memoir is not a literary autobiography in the same sense that [John Updike's Self-Consciousness or Philip Roth's The Facts] are, largely because it is limited to Wolff's childhood and nowhere explicitly refers to his having become a fiction writer as an adult. Nonetheless, just as the Updike and Roth autobiographies arrive at their own definitions of the relationship between an author's life and his fiction and enact the conclusions drawn about that relationship, Wolff's book similarly represents an attempt to re-examine the prevailing assumptions about the differences between fact and fiction and to create a literary work in the interstices between...