A Review of The Boys of My Youth

In her book The Boys of My Youth, Jo Ann Beard brings together the disjointed memories of childhood and the all-too-intense moments of adulthood to build a picture of life as it is actually experienced. Many authors of memoir tell their life stories as though they remember all the details, as though they were able to comprehend the events of their early childhood. J.R. Moehringer, for example, details many events of his early life with such specificity that it can only have been reconstructed. After all, no one goes through childhood taking notes for a memoir. This is not to say that novel-like memoirs are not good stories, but life doesn’t work like a novel, and especially in our earliest years, we experience life without context. To the very young, all language is foreign. The things that shape us are often those we understand the least. We will spend large portions of life trying to understand the mysterious events and people that have shaped us from the beginning. These people are our gods, and these stories are our myths.

Underlying Beard’s book is an unstated understanding, an acknowledgement of the mysteries into which we are born. With that knowledge for a base, the book brings clarity and adult perception to the strange and foggy memories of her childhood, and then it leads readers through the painful moments of awakening that brought Beard out of her mythical dream.

The essays in this collection progress from short clips of memories to detailed and fully felt experiences in such a way that the reader understands that the child who watched teenagers nearly drowning in the river’s undertow is the same as the woman who left work early and learned of her coworkers’ murder later that day. The woman who went on a road trip with a man she loved madly is the same woman who took a trip alone trying to reestablish her independence.

Themes of love, aging and death recur throughout the narrative as young Jo Ann observes the world and adult Jo Ann participates in it. As a child, she accompanies her grandmother on care-taking jobs, and she observes the degeneration of age as one old woman, unable to care for herself, sleeps in a crib and responds mutely to the words of her husband and caretaker. Adult Jo Ann finds herself waking up throughout the night to wash the bedding of her old, dying dog that was once vibrant and protective and now must be carried up and down stairs and constantly cleaned up after. Jo Ann and her sister must also face the aging and death of their mother, detailed in the essay “Waiting”, and they watch as their mother loses her abilities to speak and to care for herself.

Love and relationships crop up repeatedly as Jo Ann observes the love lives of others. Her grandmother, to the dismay of her children, re-married only a year after her husband died. Her mother, frustrated by her own husband’s drinking but also unable to bear his sobriety, loved her husband nonetheless and cared for him tenderly even when he came home bloodied from a severe drunk driving accident. A man and a woman, total strangers, argue in their driveway at night, “Honey, don’t,” the man keeps saying. The woman wants to know “Why her? Why her?” This, too, goes into the young girl’s mental file on relationships.

But Beard also observes platonic relationships between friends, between siblings and cousins, between humans and animals, and between coworkers. In these relationships, there is a different kind of love. It is accepting and good natured, though sometimes the interaction is tense as when Jo Ann and her sister Linda are in their mother’s hospital room and Beard writes, “She stretches her legs out and groans, gives me a dirty look, and I give her one back. I hold two fingers up to remind her of how much longer she needs to keep this up, to pay attention. She holds up one finger, guess which one, to remind me of who’s the oldest, who’s the boss. I would love more than anything to slap her.”

But love is also joyful and exciting as when Jo Ann and her friend Elizabeth spent their afternoons admiring Dave Anderson from afar, calling him over and over. Love is empathetic, too, when Elizabeth calls, sobbing with the grief of her divorce, and Jo Ann consoles her, “Of course you’re lying on the floor,” as if to say, “What else would anyone expect at a time like this?”

Though the essays are mostly short, they are vivid, and each one illustrates a different part of the fractured internal image we have of ourselves. They are self-portraits, some in the light of a blossoming romance, some in the light of divorce, some in the various lights of childhood, and some in the light of tragedy. Each provides a unique picture, but all have the same subject.

Wholeness is the goal here, consistency between the three-year-old who lost her favorite doll and the 30-something who is rebuilding her life without a husband. The people who have been with her all along serve as signposts, evidence that this is still the same life: the father is still present, the mother, the sister, the friend. Imperfect as they may be, these people lend context to a life. It is through these signposts that we define our world, our boundaries, which is why when one of them is lost, the whole world seems to spin out of control. It is as though a planet has fallen out of the solar system.

Some people aim for total independence in life, for the ability to define oneself without influence from others. It is perhaps an American ideal to see ourselves as islands, even though we love to say “no man is an island.” Women especially strive to see ourselves not as our fathers’ daughters, not as wives or as mothers but as independent people who happen to have relationships based on genetics or occupations. But Beard’s book bravely explores the very real territory of who we are within our relationships as well as without. Without our relationships, we are often panicked on a scorching highway, pursued by manic strangers, whether they are our own demons or a crazy man from a truck stop. Without relationships, we don’t have anyone to coach us over the phone: eat a banana, don’t kill yourself, take a walk.

This book’s answer to the question of independence is that human beings need one another, but we cannot define ourselves strictly in terms of another person. Marriages are not always fulfilling, and people we love can drop out of our lives through no choice of their own, but those experiences that bring love into our lives and those that bring the kind of pain from which we grow are the essential stuff of life. Without experience, we have no life, and without others, there is nothing to experience. So we seek out others to share our experiences, and as Beard writes, “We are no longer bored.”

Find the book here: The Boys of My Youth