The Boys of My Youth

Coyotes is the essay reviewers single out to skip, and other readers echo the complaint describing patches of the collection as “laborious as hell to read”. The nonchronological structure disorients some readers early on, since they can’t place what decade or which version of the narrator they’re in until well past the opening pages. For readers who don’t take to it, the present-tense, detail-heavy style reads as a workshop tic, “more like tangential modern poetry than memoir essays” than anything with a throughline. Essays without a death, a divorce, or a crisis pulling the reader forward strike some as self-indulgent, important because they happened to Beard rather than because they land on the page. A share of readers never connect with the acclaim at all: one admits spending the book “half day-dreaming the entire way through”, and another puts it more bluntly: “I don’t understand why everybody else likes this gobbledegook”.