Book review
Sara Suleri Goodyear’s Meatless Days, recognized now as a classic of postcolonial literature, is a finely wrought memoir of her girlhood in Pakistan after the 1947 Partition, set around the women of her family—her grandmother, mother and sisters. In Boys Will Be Boys, she returns—with the same treasury of language, humour and passion—to her childhood and early adulthood to pay tribute to her father, the political journalist Z.A. Suleri (known as Pip, for his ‘patriotic and preposterous’ disposition).
Taking its title from that jokingly chosen by her father for his unwritten autobiography, Boys Will Be Boys dips in and out of Suleri Goodyear’s upbringing in Pakistan and her life in the United States, moving between public and private history and addressing questions of loss and cultural displacement through a resolutely comic lens. In this rich portrait, Pip emerges as a prodigious figure—ardent agitator against the British, founder of the Times of Karachi, editor of Pakistan Times, for a brief time director of the Pakistan military intelligence service, and a frequently jailed antagonist of successive Pakistani leaders. Through it all, she invites the reader into an intimacy shaped equally by history and intensely personal detail, creating an elegant elegy for a man of force and contradiction.

About the author Sara Suleri Goodyear is professor of English at Yale University. She is the author of Meatless Days and The Rhetoric of English in India.