Overview
One morning, a box was delivered to Elizabeth Stone's door. It held ten years of personal diaries and a letter that began "Dear Elizabeth, You must be wondering why I left you my diaries in my will. After all, we have not seen each other in over twenty years . . ."What followed was a remarkable year in Elizabeth's life as she read Vincent's diaries and began to learn about the high school student she had taught twenty-five years before. A Boy I Once Knew is the story of the man that Vincent had become-and the efforts of his teacher to make some sense of his life.
With his diaries, Vincent becomes a constant presence in her household. She follows his daily life in San Francisco and his travels abroad. She watches him deal with the deaths of friends in the gay community. She judges him. She gets angry with him. She develops affection and compassion for him. In some ways she brings him back to life. And in doing so, she becomes the student, and Vincent the teacher. He forces her to examine her life as well as his. He challenges her feelings and fears about death. He proves to her that relationships between two people can deepen even after one of them is gone.
A Boy I Once Knew is a powerful book about loss, memory, and the ways in which we belong to each other. This is a revealing, moving, and wholly unexpected book.
Synopsis
One morning, a box was delivered to Elizabeth Stone's door. It held ten years of personal diaries and a letter that began "Dear Elizabeth, You must be wondering why I left you my diaries in my will. After all, we have not seen each other in over twenty years . . ."
What followed was a remarkable year in Elizabeth's life as she read Vincent's diaries and began to learn about the high school student she had taught twenty-five years before. A Boy I Once Knew is the story of the man that Vincent had become-and the efforts of his teacher to make some sense of his life.
With his diaries, Vincent becomes a constant presence in her household. She follows his daily life in San Francisco and his travels abroad. She watches him deal with the deaths of friends in the gay community. She judges him. She gets angry with him. She develops affection and compassion for him. In some ways she brings him back to life. And in doing so, she becomes the student, and Vincent the teacher. He forces her to examine her life as well as his. He challenges her feelings and fears about death. He proves to her that relationships between two people can deepen even after one of them is gone.
A Boy I Once Knew is a powerful book about loss, memory, and the ways in which we belong to each other. This is a revealing, moving, and wholly unexpected book.
Kirkus Reviews
High-school English teacher Stone chronicles a journey of discovery that began when she received a case of diaries bequeathed to her by a former student who died of AIDS. Vincent was in one of Stone's very first classes, and they exchanged Christmas cards for more than 20 years, but they were never particularly close. She doesn't remember that much about him, other than his response as a 15-year-old to "The Gift of the Magi" and a single visit when he was 16. When his box of journals appears on Stone's doorstep, it takes her a moment even to understand that she's looking at a record of Vincent's final years. Puzzled but moved, Stone then spends three years becoming ever more absorbed by the artifacts, filled with ephemera from the life of a gay man enjoying San Francisco and traveling around the world. Her mood is one of grim anticipation; though his entries start out jauntily enough, he is soon engulfed by the horror of the mysterious plague that races through his community. Vincent discovers his first Kaposi's Sarcoma lesions, pays hospital visits to friends who will never recover, and makes squares for the AIDS quilt in memory of those who have been claimed by the disease. Reading about his inexorable decline, Stone finds parallels in her own life, including her inability to connect with the memory of loved ones who have died and the crisis provoked by her mother's mental deterioration. Vincent becomes more and more intensely real to her, and as she sees him handle the pain of watching his friends cut down one after another, Stone garners insight into how to treat her mother with dignity while making the best possible arrangements for medical care. Somewhat slight but never saccharine,a graceful homage to an ordinary man