Pedro Hoffmeister
The End of Boys
The End
of Boys
a memoir
Peter Hoffmeister was a nervous child who ran away repeatedly and bit his fingernails until they bled. Home-schooled until the age of fourteen, he had only to deal with his parents and siblings on a daily basis, yet even that sometimes proved too much for him.
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The End of Boys follows Hoffmeister to the very brink of sanity and back, in a harrowing and heartbreaking account of the trauma of adolescence and the redemption available to us all, if only we choose to find it.
Reviews
Good + Bad
“Peter Brown Hoffmeister calls every sense into play, providing rich imagery, grounded reflection, and the tension inherent in a coming-of-age tale in which drugs, violence, and a genetic tendency toward OCD conspire.”
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— Los Angeles Review
“Compelling from the first page, The End of Boys is a stark and gritty memoir of a tormented adolescence, where the demons of obsessive compulsive disorder, drugs, and violence are banished by the healing light of literature and faith. Both haunting and uplifting, The End of Boys is a touching and powerful account of a turbulent transition from youth to manhood.”
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—Jamie Maslin, author of Socialist Dreams and Beauty Queens and Iranian Rappers and Persian Porn
"In vivid prose, Peter Brown Hoffmeister depicts the relentlessly violent days and nights of a male adolescence. He writes about authorities' failures to protect their young charges, and about the consequences of those failures. At the book's best moments, Hoffmeister looks directly at his rage and tells us what he sees."
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— Sarah Manguso, author of The Two Kinds of Decay