Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No to the bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

This show began over 30 years ago, and one of the first books that was on this show was a book, a memoir called This Boy's Life.

It's by my guest, Tobias Wolfe.

Now, the original publisher, Grove, has published a 30th anniversary edition of This Boy's Life.

I'll tell you, if you do a book show, and I know you don't,

you don't get to reread the books that you read 30 years ago.

And so I reread This Boy's Life.

It's better than I remembered it even originally, and I loved it originally.

Tell me, did you ever expect that your hands would be dirtied by this book again?

Oh, you never know what to expect with a book, what sort of life it will have. When you finish a book,

you're pretty much thinking then about the next book. Elliot has a wonderful line in the four

quartets. He says, for us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

And that's something that a writer I'd better take to heart.

Well, this boy's life, it's one of the first memoirs in this huge movement, which restored memoir to respectability, but also, although you insist on

its factuality, it stands at the beginning of what becomes the train of auto fiction.

...