In five or six writing courses I've taken, the instructors assigned “The Fourth State of Matter,” an essay from JoAnn Beard’s memoir The Boys of My Youth. I had to read it over and over. But there’s a reason why so many instructors assign it. Wow, what a piece of creative nonfiction! What occurs in the story is what happens when Beard was in the right place at the wrong time.

I’m not trying to be cryptic or coy. It’s best to let the stunning essay at the heart of the book speak for itself and take you by surprise.

This book is actually a collection of essays, but I call it a memoir because the essays are memoir pieces loosely placed together. Oddly, the effect is that of a more traditional memoir, although the book does not give the impression of one complete story.

I have to admit that the other essays don't move me the same way that "The Fourth State of Matter" does, but the book is so exquisitely written it's an experience readers shouldn't miss.
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Jo Ann Beard's first collection of nonfiction essays is outstanding. When Beard's at her best is in her most lyrical moments, particularly in the braided essay "Coyotes" and the last days of her mother's life in "Waiting." "The Boys of My Youth" coheres loosely in chronological order and succeeds in peeling back the layers of Beard's life and her experiences both anguishing and astonishing. I've read "The Fourth State of Matter" three times now and I am still rocked at the end. ( )

I admire Beard's ability to get inside the mind of a very young child or teenager. It's hard to turn off your adult voice and truly remember what it's like to be a kid again, but Beard does it very convincingly. And her style doesn't remind me of anyone else's—it is unique to her. Very impressive. ( )

I was mesmerized by the writing style of Jo Ann Beard. She did a magnificent job capturing her youth, really her life in general, from the time when she was about three up through adult years. I laughed out loud as some of her descriptions of her relationship with her mother, her aunts, friends, siblings.

She wrote often saying, "We" this, or "they" that. She might be referencing herself for "we" or maybe her and her doll, Hal, or someone else, but it was so uniquely done. Her voice in these stories comes through and takes a reader right into her head, and how she thought of situations throughout her life.

One scene with her doll, Hal, is absolutely hilarious. Jo Ann had "experimented" with Hal by putting him in the tub. He now lay soaking wet in a sodden mass on the floor. Her mother came in to wash her hair and evidently Jo Ann, at three, hated having her hair washed and threw a hissy fit. Her mother, just as determined and resolute "brass knuckled" her head in the towel after it was all over and then swatted her on her rear end.

Here's a snippet to show how she captured her voice and actions at three years of age.

"The bathroom ceiling had sparkles on it. The dog-in-the-boat stain was still there. Hal was wadded up inside a towel on the floor. I unrolled him and we lay on the bath mat together, panting quietly. They had manhandled us."

I could go on and on, but with that five stars, you can tell, I loved her writing!

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My mother is sewing a button on my father’s shirt while he’s still wearing it. “I was having this terrible feeling,” she says, “that she’d be this forty-year-old woman, going around telling people that we took her d-o-l-l away from her.” She leans down to bite off the thread. My father tests his new button and it works perfectly. “In three days she won’t remember she even knew that d-o-l-l,” he predicts.

But of course Beard remembers, and tells, in this 1998 non-linear collection of linked personal essays. They’re coming-of-age essays, where growing up is as likely to occur at thirty as at thirteen or three. Each age is rendered perfectly, as are the characters and the 1970s-80s period details of small-town Midwest.

Among the boys of Beard’s youth are Hal, that beloved d-o-l-l her mother’s oldest sister bullies her mother into throwing away; teenage boys who mostly ignore her at backwoods parties; her father who drinks and disappears for weeks at a time; Eric: boyfriend, husband, …; and a school-shooter who kills Beard’s colleagues in the University of Iowa physics department on a day she’s gone home early to care for her aging dog. There are girls, too -- aunts and cousins; her older, nemesis sister; her mother who smokes on every page; a lifelong best friend she consults while writing these essays.

I love these people and their settings, love Beard’s writing and want more. I've just read her new novel In Zanesville, the first half of which feels exactly like these essays. I'm off to scour the Internet for anything else she's written. ( )