Bad Boy: A Memoir

Although Bad Boy is the story of Walter Dean Myers’s own life, the Myers who narrates the book is not the same, temperamentally, as the Myers who is the book’s main character. This largely reflects the fact that Bad Boy is a coming-of-age story—and, more specifically, one that is very interested in how children and adolescents adopt new identities and transform their old ones as they grow up. In Myers’s case, his identity is inseparable from his experiences as a black man who grew up in a mixed-race and working-class household in 1940s and 50s Harlem. As a child and young man, these experiences were often a source of confusion and frustration for him; Myers had always been an intelligent and creative child, and both his mother and his teachers encouraged him to approach his future with optimism and confidence. As he grew older, however, Myers was increasingly forced to reckon with the fact that his race and his family’s finances limited his options for higher education. As a result, Myers came to feel he had been cheated out of a life he had been promised, which helps explain why he so often acts impulsively (e.g. jumping off roofs), recklessly (e.