Tobias Wolff

To begin with, Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff’s lives were filled with misfortune, misery, and abuse. In addition to this, the brothers also went through their own form of hardship while living with their parents. Geoffrey, who lived with his father and Tobias, living with his mother. With this in mind, I will compare and contrast the central conflict behind their family issues and apply it to their work. In other words, compare Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff’s childhood and look at how it impacted them as adults. With regards to this, I will also look at how their childhood experiences influenced their writing style. For example, Geoffrey tends to write really long and dense paragraphs, while Tobias on the hand, typically keeps his shorter.

In The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey Wolff took on the task of justifying the lies that created a barrier between family, friends, and the general public. His memories from his childhood are disturbing, jaw-dropping, and tangled with guilt. The memoir begins with Geoffrey Wolff learning of his father’s death in 1970. With this knowledge, Wolff revealed the enigma that

Geoffrey, however, is eight years older than Tobias and when their parents divorced, Geoffrey headed off to live with his father, and Tobias with his mother. To begin with, both books are similar in describing the horrendous childhood that Geoffrey, and Jack, endured. In addition to this, they’re complicated with mental illness, scenes of broken families, and lower middle class poverty. In The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey described his father, Arthur (Duke) Wolff as a “con-man” (Wolff 7). He ripped off family members, friends, and even his own son at times. On the contrary, despite being ripped off by his own father, Geoffrey admitted “as I dislike him more and more, I became more and more like him” (10). To put it differently, Geoffrey felt trapped. The person he despised the most, was the person he was