My Young Life: A Memoir

Novelist Tuten (Tintin in the New World) delivers a stirring portrait of himself as a poor, young man growing up in the Bronx of the 1940s through the ’60s, striving to become an artist. From age 10, he dreamed simply of eating apple pie, going to Yankee Stadium, and having a father who hadn’t left the family. When those hopes of having an ordinary childhood didn’t come to fruition, he turned to literature, girls, and art, and imagined living as a painter and a writer in Paris. Though smart and creative, he continually sidelined his academic and writing goals in favor of love affairs, dead-end jobs, and drinking binges. He became part of the Greenwich Village literary scene, meeting such writers as Ernest Hemingway and various beat poets, whose writing he tried to emulate. His description of the bars and cafes he frequented in order to “live intently” bring to life the city that shaped him, though at the time they mostly served as excuses to once again put off writing. He vividly recalls memories from his 20s, especially the crushes he developed, such as one on a fellow student named Sandra (“She lived in my morning coffee.... She lived deep in my guts, where no reason sounded”). Ultimately, he gave up trying to write like his idols and developed his own style, which at first is “a mess,” but also, as he acknowledges, “my mess, imitative of no other.” This is a wonderfully raw story of city boy’s transformation into a writer. (Mar.)