Our Story Continues: Tobias Wolff

by Pauline Uchmanowicz, February 25, 2010

Tobias Wolff speaks in a voice as direct and steady as an electric can opener. The award-winning writer’s telephone personality seems in keeping with incisive portrayals of life’s jagged resonances made audible in his memoirs, novels, and short stories. Known for candor and authenticity in depicting both real and invented characters, abetted by razor-sharp prose, the master storyteller has honed his craft over the course of four decades.

Wolff was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1945. An unconventional, peripatetic upbringing followed, as chronicled in his 1989 PEN Faulkner Award-winning memoir This Boy’s Life. (A film adaptation in which Leo
nardo DiCaprio plays the author as a young teenager came out in 1993, but Wolff declines to discuss it.) Clear and unblinking, it inaugurated the memoir of self-disclosure. His parents divorced when Tobias was 10, separating him and his mother from his brother Geoffrey and their father. Tormented by an overbearing stepfather, adolescent Toby developed a proclivity for spinning tales and adopting various personae as a coping mechanism. A vocation as a writer inevitably emerged. “That was what I wanted to do from age 15. I never formed another ambition,” Wolff told me. “And I wrote a lot. Like most young people who begin to write I did it out of imitative admiration for writers I read. I even changed my name to Jack, for Jack London.”

Determined to escape a dismal life in rural Washington State, erstwhile Jack conned his way into an East Coast boarding school, the eventual setting for the 2003 novel Old School, finalist for a slew of national literary prizes. The book’s unnamed narrator, a fledgling writer, reveres Hemingway. “I hope I owe a debt to Hemingway,” Wolff acknowledges. “I admire him for the clarity, for the exactitude of his style. He’s really a musician (and wrote poetry too) in the way the words create certain sounds and carry from sentence to sentence. He was very influential in terms of suggesting an apparently natural style. He treated his past, but I saw the difference—writers dip their cup in the well of memory—but it didn’t confine him. Same with Fitzgerald. I really loved his work.”