“What if,” its narrator wonders, “I could write about my life exactly as it was? What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed?” The “realism” of the 19th-century fiction he devours seems to him a kind of fantasy, creating a “parallel life”, “tinglingly far-fetched”.
A Boy’s Own Story is both a masterpiece in the literature of adolescence and a pivotal book in the history of gay writing, opening up the landscape of teenage homosexuality with revelatory frankness.
