The Imaginary Girlfriend
by John Irving | 
The Opposite of Fate
by Amy Tan | 
The Summing Up
by W. Somerset Maugham | 
My Mother Was Nuts
by Penny Marshall | 
Dead End Gene Pool
by Wendy Burden | 
The Memory Chalet
by Tony Judt | 
Patrimony
by Philip Roth | 
What Remains
by Carole Radziwill | 
Let Me Finish
by Roger Angell |
Untold Stories
by Alan Bennett |
Elsewhere
by Richard Russo | 
Ways of Escape
by Graham Greene | 
The Death of Santini
by Pat Conroy | 
Myself When Young
by Daphne Du Maurier | 
Blackbird
by Jennifer Lauck | 
Blue Nights
by Joan Didion | 
You Don't Have to Say You Love Me
by Sherman Alexie | 
The Writing Life
by Annie Dillard | 
Upstream
by Mary Oliver |
Tell Me More
by Kelly Corrigan |
Rarely does the debut of a new writer garner such attention & acclaim. The excitement began the moment "The Fourth State of Matter," one of the fourteen extraordinary personal narratives in this book, appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. It increased when the author received a prestigious Whiting Foundation Award in November 1997, & it continued as the hardcover edition of The Boys of My Youth sold out its first printing even before publication. The author writes with perfect pitch as she takes us through one woman's life -- from childhood to marriage & beyond -- & memorably captures the collision of youthful longing & the hard intransigences of time & fate.