It’s the birthday of Tobias Wolff (b. 1945), one of the great contemporary American authors, best known for his short stories and his memoirs.

Wolff was born in Birmingham, Alabama, to a father who was a pathological liar and a mother who made a number of abysmal choices man-wise. His father drank, lied, scammed, and changed jobs frequently, and when Wolff was five or six his parents divorced. Wolff went with his mother, and his older brother, Geoffrey, went with his father. Wolff and his mother spent some time living with and fleeing from her abusive boyfriend; eventually they ended up in Seattle, where she married a man who made Wolff’s childhood miserable by hectoring, controlling, and humiliating him. Wolff and his brother, raised entirely separately, both engaged somewhat in lies, theft, and forgeries; Wolff even faked letters of reference from high school teachers to get accepted at The Hill School, a private school near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. But eventually, both brothers would grow up to become successful writers. Wolff wrote about his rough childhood in This Boy’s Life: A Memoir (1989). Geoffrey had by then written a book about his own childhood, The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father (1979). The brothers are very different writers and very supportive of one another.

Wolff was eventually expelled from The Hill School and joined the army, serving in the Vietnam War; he writes about this experience in another highly-acclaimed memoir, In Pharoah’s Army (1994). After the war he studied at Oxford and then Stanford, where he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. His first published collection of short stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, came out in 1981, and contains one of the darkest, funniest, grimmest stories since Flannery O’Connor, “Hunters in the Snow.” (Read it. Read it today.)

After his roller coaster of a childhood, Wolff’s adulthood has been remarkably stable and placid. He taught from 1980-1997 at Syracuse University, at which point he switched to Stanford; 1997 is the same year his third collection of stories was published, The Night in Question. He’s married with three children; he’s a devout (if private) Catholic. (His family was actually Jewish but he was lied to about this and didn’t find out until adulthood.) About his writing routine, he told The Paris Review in an interview (Issue 171, Fall 2004), “I have a study in the basement of the university library. They offered me a nice place to work with a view of the Stanford hills, and I turned it down for this dump in the stacks because I’m so easily distracted. All I need is a window to not write….If I have a good novel in the room with me, I’ll end up reading that.”

Enjoy your Tuesday all out of proportion to its actual content and stay scrupulously honest to the data.