His father, Jack, operated a heating and air conditioning business; his mother, Joan (Donnelly) was a housewife who died when he was eleven.

It was a fictionalized account of the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a 20th-century philosopher, and also included Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore as secondary characters.

In The Philadelphia Inquirer, Thomas Morawetz (a Wittgenstein expert) characterized the work as "a rich, eloquent, poised masterwork that succeeds beyond one’s most generous expectations", while Richard Eder noted in the Los Angeles Times that "it is hard to know which is more outsized – the talent of Bruce Duffy or his nerve".

The plot – partly inspired by Duffy's upbringing in suburban Maryland – centered on a 12-year-old boy who leaves home with two friends in the aftermath of his mother’s death.

[1] Duffy's third and final book, Disaster Was My God: A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud, was released by Doubleday on July 19 of the following year.

[5] He had spent the intervening years reflecting on the works and wild life of the French poet, in order to "create that oxymoron, a likable Arthur Rimbaud".