Skip content
Get two free audiobooks AND support local bookstores Make the switch
The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks when you make the switch!

Nowโ€™s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weโ€™ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Make the switch
Libro.fm app with gift bow

Gift audiobook credit bundles

You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.

Start gifting

The Boys of My Youth

$26.24

Get for $14.99 with membership
Narrator Jo Ann Beard

This audiobook uses AI narration.

Weโ€™re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more
Length 7 hours 52 minutes
Language English
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

The "utterly compelling, uncommonly beautiful" collection of personal essays (Newsweek) that established Jo Ann Beard as one of the leading writers of her generation.

Cousins, mothers, sisters, dolls, dogs, best friends: these are the fixed points in Jo Ann Beard's universe, the constants that remain when the boys of her youth -- and then men who replace them -- are gone. This widely praised collection of autobiographical essays summons back, with astonishing grace and power, moments of childhood epiphany as well as the cataclysms of adult life: betrayal, divorce, death.
The Boys of My Youth heralded the arrival of an immensely gifted and influential writer and its essays remain surprising, original, and affecting today.
"A luminous, funny, heartbreaking book of essays about life and its defining moments." --Harper's Bazaar

Jo Ann Beard is also the author of the novel In Zanesville. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and Best American Essays. She has received a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Jo Ann Beard is also the author of the novel In Zanesville. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and Best American Essays. She has received a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks when you make the switch!

Nowโ€™s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weโ€™ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Make the switch
Libro.fm app with gift bow

Gift audiobook credit bundles

You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.

Start gifting

Reviews

"Smart, funny, and moving...A gifted and gutsy writer...This is what a first collection of stories should be."โ€”Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe "Extraordinary...Beard is writing not with the romanticism of a girl looking up at the stars, but with the brilliant cold light of the stars looking down on us."โ€”Ted Anton, Chicago Tribune "Beard remembers (or imagines) her childhood self with an uncanny lucidity that startles."โ€”Laura Miller, New York Times Book Review Expand reviews
Get two free audiobooks AND support local bookstores Make the switch