The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father by Geoffrey Wolff; This Boy's Life: A Memoir by Tobias Wolff

Random House (1979) and Harper & Row (1989)

Writing teachers tell their students to keep good words in their ears.

“On a sunny day in a sunny humor I could sometimes think of death as mere gossip, the ugly rumor behind that locked door over there.”

So begins Geoffrey Wolf’s 1979 memoir The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father.

It continues.

“John said: ‘Your father is dead.’

“And I said: ‘Thank God.’

“John recoiled from my words. I heard someone behind me gasp. The words did not then strike a blow above my heart, but later they did, and there was no calling them back, there is no calling them back now. All I can do now is try to tell what they meant.

“My father was a bullshit artist.”

What follows is a headlong rush into what could only be fiction were it not truth.

When I was younger, a family friend's husband purported to have graduated from a nearby Ivy League. There were references to the couple’s attendance at reunions, the idea of which made me uncomfortable, given no apparent evidence of matriculation, but who knows, maybe he did, and why did it even matter? My protagonists are long dead. There is no reason to ponder further.

I can only imagine the discomfort Geoffrey Wolff felt about a father who throughout adulthood falsely claimed to have graduated from Yale and the Sorbonne, who lied his way into jobs for which he lacked any qualifications (including stints as an aeronautical engineer at Boeing), who wrote bad checks, who changed his name, and who lied about his religion.

Wolff’s father was a grifter. After his parents' breakup, teenaged Geoffrey, the eldest son who later graduated from Princeton, remained with his father and looked after him, even though it should have been the reverse.

His younger brother, Tobias Wolff, landed in the care of his mother, living no less a colorful life, mostly on the West Coast.

A decade after his brother wrote The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father, Tobias Wolff published This Boy’s Life: A Memoir.

In the opening scene, Toby and his mother are escaping an abusive man and driving west to settle in a new city.

“Our car boiled over again just after my mother and I crossed the Continental Divide. While we were waiting for it to cool we heard, from somewhere above us, the bawling of an airhorn. The sound got louder and then a big truck came around the corner and shot past us into the next curve, its trailer shimmying wildly. We stared after it. ‘Oh, Toby,’ my mother said, ‘he’s lost his brakes.” 

Required reading for today’s would-be memoirist, The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father and This Boy's Life are fascinating and masterfully crafted, yet at times both feel like an amble through a minefield.

You might find yourself thinking: How did I get to this ominous and seedy locale, and how do I get out?

Yet if you haven't tasted Wolff, I recommend both varieties, with sufficient time to digest between servings.