The Boy on the Green Bicycle: A Memoir

By Margaret Diehl

Book Overview

Memory can distort, diffuse, simply omit. Or it can clarify, confirm, preserve forever fragments from the flow of our lives. From such pieces, Margaret Diehl has re-created the enchantment of her... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1569472017
• ISBN13: 9781569472019
• Release Date: July 2003
• Publisher: Soho Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

A Very Touching Memoir

I really enjoyed this book. Having lost my older brother when I was young, I can relate to it. Some of it was hard to read, but after I read it, I felt better knowing that there were others that had gone through what I did.

Blast from the Past

The French word for a psychic is "une sensible," which translates as "a sensitive." In "The Boy on the Green Bicycle," which just won well-deserved recognition as one of the New York Times Most Notable Books of 1999, Margaret Diehl transmits an astonishing range of sensations and perceptions related to childhood which seem almost impossible for one human to have remembered, let alone to have borne. Impossible, that is, until you lie down with the book and open yourself to it the way Diehl opened herself to books as a child: "I had uncurled like a hedgehog, exposed my soft parts to the wave of the story." If the excruciating honesty of the book doesn't scare you off, you'll be afforded the closest thing there is to time travel--childhood unrolls itself before you, like the magic garden in Diehl's back yard. While the tragedies dealt with here, the accidental death of her idolized older brother and the subsequent suicide of her father, may lie beyond the reach of others' experience, Diehl's narrative of everyday childhood experience is unsurpassed. It is as if Diehl has suffered no memory loss, as if she has the sensations of a three-year-old or seven-year-old as fresh in her brain as when they were first imprinted. Her recollections of her intercourse with the natural world and of the relentless drama of family life, impossible for outsiders to grasp, are especially stunning. She delivers her own soul up to the reader, along with gentle but unsparing portraits of the entire family, in a fearless prose of vivid invention. Diehl is a writer not only for those whom language makes giddy, but for any reader as brave as she, any ready to receive the transmissions from this "sensitive," any reader honest enough to open up and say, yes, this is how it was...

I'm loving this book

I am enthralled with this memoir. It is like having the author there with you telling you her story. She is breaking my heart with the stories regarding her less than loving Father. And I am touched by the loving memories she has of her Mother. This is what a memoir should be. I'm enjoying each word in this wonderful book.

I wish all books were this engaging

I started reading "The Boy on the Green Bicycle" hoping to share in a stranger's childhood remembrances. I got a lot more than I expected.Margaret Diehl weaves words like a spider weaves its web....... you think you can meander along, capable of disengaging at will. Wrong. Her beautiful prose teases and promises and subtly ensnares.....I enjoyed every paragraph. I couldn't stop reading it. I wish I could find more books this engaging.

An astonishingly beautiful book

I've never read anything like this before -- descriptions of childhood on a cellular level, what it felt like, smelled like, tasted like, and more -- other senses that live purely in Margaret Diehl's imagination but that resonate with ours. A hilarious, moving, compulsively readable memoir about beauty, family, aching loneliness and aching love of life. I couldn't put it down, didn't want to leave the mind of this child and the drama of her family. Diehl is a true original and takes you to places that seem like your own forgotten dreams.