Wolff chronicled his early life in two memoirs. "This Boy's Life" (1989), winner of the "Los Angeles Times" Book Award for Biography, is devoted to the author's adolescence in Seattle and Newhalem, a remote company town in the North Cascade mountains of Washington. The memoir describes the nomadic and uncertain life Wolff and his mother led after his parents divorced. His mother's subsequent marriage to a man who was revealed as an abusive husband and stepfather deeply affected their lives. "In Pharaoh's Army" (1994) records Wolff's U.S. Army tour of duty in Vietnam.