Jo Ann Beard - The Boys of My Youth

Iwould like to express my gratitude to the Corporation of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, for their generous gift of time, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in Ithaca, for much-needed financial support. My sincere appreciation to Lizzie Grossman for her sustained belief in my writing, her sanity, and her charming unwillingness to accept rejection when it came our way.

For their friendship, support, and encouragement, I offer profound thanks to Marilyn Abildskov, Mary Allen, Julene Bair, Charlie Buck, Barbara Camillo, Martha Christiansen, Marian Clark, Tory Dent, Sara DiDonato, Ellen Fagg, Gaile Gallatin, Wesley Gibson, Kathy Harris, Tony Hoagland, Will Jennings, Kathy Kiley, Carl Klaus, Edward Lawler, Jane and Michael OMelia, Maxine Rodburg, Corbin Sexton, Bob Shacochis, Kathy Siebenmann, Jo Southard, David Stern, Patricia Stevens, Shirley Tarbell, and that beloved girl of my youth, Elizabeth White.

Truly extraordinary. Its a daring act and also a bit of a magic trick to focus on a scrap of real life a failed family vacation, a run-in with an irate driver, adolescent ridiculousness, a marriage on the skidsand manage to spin it into something sad and beautiful. Yet that is exactly what Beard does. It is the simple fact that Beard gives voice to these small moments of sometimes sad, sometimes joyous truths the all but forgotten time that composes the bulk of real life that makes her writing so moving. Beard finds, always and perfectly, the heartbreaking poetry in everyday speech.

LIESEL LITZENBURGER, Detroit Free Press

This engaging collection records both wrenching and riotous episodes in the life of a keenly observant character named Jo Ann, whom we follow from babyhood to marriage and beyond. Humor, terrific insights, and not a little rue make these stories shine, each one a jewel loaded with sparkle and grit.

Elle

Beard pulls off a neat trick: She shows tragedy for what it is in life plain old moment-to-moment misery.

JANET STEEN, Time Out New York

Exquisitely crafted autobiographical essays that have the arc and thrust of good fiction. Beards high-wire trick is that despite such grievous subject matter, she hangs on to her squinty, skinny-girl-on-the-sidelines sense of humor and never lapses into mawkishness.

SARAH TOWERS, Mirabella

Jo Ann Beards work impresses me no end. Funny without being sitcomish, self-aware without being self-absorbed, scrupulous without being fussy, emotional without being sentimental, pointed without being cruel I could go on and on with these distinctions, all in Beards favor, but instead Ill just say that Jo Ann Beard is a fantastic writer, an Athena born fully formed out of her own painstaking head.

JEFFREY EUGENIDES, author of The Virgin Suicides

Reading Jo Ann Beards prose feels as comfortable as falling into step beside an old, intimate friend. Shes the sort of writer whose charm lies in the voice a kitchen-table drawl entirely uncontaminated by sentimentality. Beard remembers (or imagines) her childhood self with an uncanny lucidity that startles.

LAURA MILLER, New York Times Book Review

Utterly compelling uncommonly beautiful. The writing lifts the book into the stratosphere. The key is a voice of equal parts curiosity and vulnerability. Life in these pages is an astonishment. The Boys of My Youth speaks volumes about growing up female and struggling to remain true to yourself.

DAN CRYER, Newsday

Jo Ann Beard sustains an almost miraculous level of detachment as she describes the stuff of nightmares and how she, and by implication all of us, survive them. Beard evokes the dizzying sensation of tragedy, but she also provides weird, sparkling moments of grace and stillness. The Boys of My Youth evokes the mundane, the hilarious, the horrific, and the redemptive all taken together, the very rhythm of life.

ELLEN KANNER, Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

Beard remembers with beautiful simplicity the feeling of youthful longing, and combines those memories with the pains that accompany adult life.

Marie Claire

These stories do it all. They are smart, funny, and moving. They are personal and unique and also universal. There is not a false note or wrong word.

BARBARA FISHER, Boston Globe

Smart, funny, and moving.A gifted and gutsy writer. This is what a first collection of stories should be.

Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe

Cousins, mothers, sisters, dolls, dogs, best friends: these are the fixed points in. Jo Ann Beards universe, the constants that remain when the boys of her youthand the men who replace themare 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. It is a book that heralds the arrival of an immensely gifted and original writer.

JO ANN BEARD received a Whiting Writers Award in 1997. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Story, and other magazines. She is a graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and now lives in upstate New York.

Extraordinary. Beard is writing not with the romanticism of a girl looking up at the stars, but with the brilliant cold light of the stars looking down at us.

Ted Anton, Chicago Tribune

A luminous, funny, heart-breaking book of essays about life and its defining moments.

Meredith Kahn, Harpers Bazaar

Beard remembers (or imagines) her childhood self with an uncanny lucidity that startles.

Laura Miller, New York Times Book Review

The family vacation. Heat, flies, sand, and dirt. My mother sweeps and complains, my father forever baits hooks and untangles lines. My younger brother has brought along his imaginary friend, Charcoal, and my older sister has brought along a real-life majorette by the name of Nan. My brother continually practices all-star wrestling moves on poor Charcoal. I got him in a figure-four leg lock! he will call from the ground, propped up on one elbow, his legs twisted together. My sister and Nan wear leg makeup, white lipstick, and say things about me in French. A river runs in front of our cabin, the color of bourbon, foamy at the banks, full of water moccasins and doomed fish. I am ten. The only thing to do is sit on the dock and read, drink watered-down Pepsi, and squint. No swimming allowed.

One afternoon three teenagers get caught in the current while I watch. They come sweeping downstream, hollering and gurgling while I stand on the bank, forbidden to step into the water, and stare at them. They are waving their arms.

I am embarrassed because teenagers are yelling at me. Within five seconds men are throwing off their shoes and diving from the dock; my own dad gets hold of one girl and swims her back in. Black hair plastered to her neck, she throws up on the mud about eight times before they carry her back to wherever she came from. One teenager is unconscious when they drag him out and a guy pushes on his chest until a low fountain of water springs up out of his mouth and nose. That kid eventually walks away on his own, but hes crying. The third teenager lands a ways down the bank and comes walking by fifteen minutes later, a grown-up on either side of him and a towel around his waist. His skin looks like Silly Putty.