This memoir of a boy growing up in Florida has stayed with me for years. Beautifully written, funny, poignant, all the positive adjectives of a memorable and lasting pleasure of a book. ( )

What a ride! The story lived up to all the hype. A unique and ground breaking memoir in its time, but still quite relevant in my opinion. ( )

The young Frank Conroy in Stop-Time is a heady mix of Holden Caulfield and George Orwell of Down and Out in Paris and London. It's the story of the son of an alcoholic, raised by a clueless mom and flighty stepfather, who frankly admits to his own cluelessless. He wanders in the backwoods of Florida, the streets of New York, and the halls of various institutions, without any guidance but his own inner energy and fierce desire to survive by observing and learning from the world around him -- which he does. You'll shake your head in wonder and awe at his recklessness and tenacity. I'm so glad he survived his haphazard childhood to write this book. ( )

I came to this because they were talking about it on the Literary Disco podcast a while back. It's a remarkable book that works as a memoir but also a coming of age novel. By the end I was seeing it as a direct forerunner of Knausgaard's epic collection which is as high praise as I can imagine. Wonderful reading. ( )

Well-crafted, highly influential coming-of-age tale that nonetheless struck me as slightly anticlimactic and faintly stuffy. It was difficult not to make mental comparisons to Frederick Exley's A FAN'S NOTES, which was published only one year later (1968) than STOP-TIME but in its passion and emotional violence feels vastly more vital. ( )