A Boy I Once Knew: What a Teacher Learned from her Student

By Elizabeth Stone

Book 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565123158
• ISBN13: 9781565123151
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.3" x 0.8" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

A Wonderful re-working of a tired genera

Stone was given a task that was impossible to do: being asked to reconstruct a life and a story in a way that would both please Vincent and be worth writing. Granted, Vincent's life was tragic, but is not a story worth repeating. It is not new tale: a troubled gay youth struggling to fit in, finding refuge in a gay metropolis, and ultimately dieing of AIDS. What is much more interesting is Stone's story. What a remarkable situation to be in: Having to write the story of a former student who has since grown estranged; to see her very human reaction to Victor's sad story. Untimely it is much more compelling and thought provoking that the story given her. Stone is an expert of narratives (as per her other book and work.) I think she could see the limits of Victor's tale; which would make for a very unremarkable and unoriginal work. Instead we see how she reacted, and we in turn can react likewise. Tragedy for Stone is not in the grand narrative, but in all the subsequent and supporting narratives. In the tired genera of AIDS-memoir Stone has breathed new life into it. Vincent is surly pleased.

I couldn't put it down

This was a totally absorbing read; I couldn't put it down and finished it within 24 hours of when I started. I disagree with the other reviewers who wanted more about Vincent; this is fundamentally Elizabeth Stone's story, as well it should be. There was a ton of food for thought here, especially in the idea of the "relationships" we actively carry on with people who have left our lives, whether due to death or just diverging life paths. The book is back on my shelf, but still in my mind.

Memorable Memoir

When I first considered reading this book I said to myself "Oh, no - not another AIDS memoir!" having read at least a dozen and lived through the 80's and 90's in the San Francisco ground-zero of AIDS.Elizabeth Stone's "A Boy I Once Knew" is something much more - a rare kind of memoir and memory game in one package. Here is a middle-aged New Jersey mother of two teenage sons in 2001 remembering a 14 yr. old student, Vincent, she briefly knew in Brooklyn 25 years earlier in the process of discovering him anew through his diaries as he grows into a 40 year old man about to die of AIDS in San Francisco in 1995. Ms. Stone ferries the reader through these dizzying time zones and locations with reflections on grief, discovery, death, illness and aging in her own family, relationships to her parents, children and husband as well as her role as teacher, mother and daughter. Reading this book is somewhat like reading a mystery where we know the beginning and the end but read to find out about the more nuanced matters in the middle. Two people become astoundingly revealed here: Vincent both through his own words and the author's recreation of him and the author through her dazzling insights into herself and her subject.

An intriguing story about a unique relationship

An unusually intriguing, hard-to-categorize book. Yes, the book is engrossing and well written, but it is the basic idea of the book - how someone who's dead emerges from a UPS package and, over time, lovingly muscles his way into the minds of the author and the reader - that stays with you. There is a kind of parabola in Vincent's life - alive, dead, and back to life again - that is fascinating. And the intersection of Vincent's curve with Stone's struggle to come to terms with these issues in her own life adds depth and universality to the story. I found myself nodding again and again as I ran into Stone's (or Vincent's) offhand insights on living and dying.

Bold Testament to the Transforming Power of Imagination

A Boy I Once Knew packs quite a wallop. Stone's fascinating and beautifully written story of the death of her former student drew me ever more deeply into his life -- and allowed me to join her on her own courageous journey of self-discovery. Confronting issues of loss, memory and meaning, this teacher's gripping narrative took me hostage, then set me free, wiser for my time under its spell. At story's end, I felt affirmed in my often shaky belief that imagination and love can transform dying into a bold act of living. If you're a teacher, a student, or, like me, just someone coping with loss, you'll love this inspiring gem of a book by a wonderful writer.