The Boy on the Green Bicycle: A Memoir

by Margaret Diehl

Soho Press, 368 pp., $25

“Not another memoir,” I can hear you moan. But yes, this one is really worth it. Diehl tells the story of her family, the perfect, rich, cultured Diehls, a Southern bunch settled in the Northeast, and the two extraordinary events that ripped the family apart and made them the shattered, shell-shocked Diehls of Upper Manhattan. What makes this memoir unique is that it oozes no balm to quell the raw pains that experience metes out to us all. Sometimes people must accept the fact that tragedy irrevocably changes us; the only possible redemption is to accept the change. Diehl has some rather stunning descriptive passages and a talent for accurately rendering what it was really like to be a fanciful, powerless child. Perhaps given the sanctity that memoirs carry these days, readers will be led to her novels Men and Me and You.

This article appears in 1999.

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