Plainspoken, Anecdote-Driven, Vivid
There's an emotional honesty, even a bluntness, to Paulsen's writing. Though he's not expansive about his own life, he doesn't gloss over gritty details, either—especially from his difficult childhood. Paulsen's not afraid to tell it like it is. He shares the information in a matter-of-fact way. He confesses he's lonely. He calls his parents "drunks."
Paulsen's writing is also anecdote-driven, which means he's good at calling up specific memories that help illustrate his points. This is a man who knows how to tell a story.
A perfect example is his memory of Fred, a fat dog who was pals with his family's pet pig.
I once came home with a dozen angel food cakes, forty pints of whipping cream, and fifty pints of strawberries. I dumped all this in the trough and watched Fred and the pig put their heads under, looking for berries and bits of cake and snorting bubbles of cream as they hunted. (7.26)
Paulsen's vivid details—the huge amounts of food, the snorting, and the bubbles in the cream—really bring the memory to life. He does the same things in his description of his dogs' antics. We can easily see them knocking over stuff and people, slobbering and staring, or leaping through the DQ drive-in window. Ditto for his description of the wilderness—it's poetic and vivid.