Novelist, essayist, and critic Frederic Tuten recalls his personal and artistic coming-of-age in 1950s New York, a defining period that would set him on the course to becoming a writer.
Each of the short chapters precisely details a specific moment of realization, however wayward and, at times, harrowing, that the author experienced on his bumpy, digressive path to becoming a writer. The result is a beautifully composed, accumulative portrait of Tuten at different stages of his young life ... What’s remarkable... is Tuten’s ability to transport you back in time ... For Tuten, there were not two roads diverging in the yellow wood. There was only the one he took: the one that he looks back upon and writes about brilliantly and tenderly.
'Fond' is the word that kept coming to mind while reading Frederic Tuten’s My Young Life ... [The book's] footnotes comprise some of the finest writing in the book, sudden chill winds of mortality that blow through this account of a young man trying to find his footing as an artist, and as an adult ... Tuten’s [memoir], dry and tender, brings something I don’t think I’ve ever encountered in any other young man’s artistic coming-of-age ... Often [a certain] kind of honesty results in the memoirist making the reader embarrassed for him, making us feel we are in his skin living through each humiliation. Tuten’s memoir has none of that. And that too seems a mark of its balance, the maturity of someone who has learned to stop obsessing over youthful foibles...
...[a] highly readable memoir ... In episodes recounted like snapshots in an album, Tuten traces intimacies of a two-decade journey ... Along the way, he shares with wry observation, pathos, and an unflinching honesty the portrait of a young man ... Tuten’s gently self-deprecating yet humorous reflections cover the linked adolescent preoccupations with creative venturing and romantic/sexual adventuring ... In the end, Tuten’s achievement is in telling a story that is at once his own while also being universally familiar.
