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. \nThe utterly compelling, uncommonly beautiful collection of personal essays (Newsweek) that established Jo Ann Beard as one of the leading writers of her generation. \nCousins, 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. \nThe Boys of My Youth heralded the arrival of an immensely gifted and influential writer and its essays remain surprising, original, and affecting today. \nA luminous, funny, heartbreaking book of essays about life and its defining moments. --Harper's Bazaar \n