Searching for a suitable answer, I raided my bookshelves and reread a pile of my favorite books from my teenage years. Laugh all you want, but these were books that moved me, fascinated me, not quite because of and not quite despite the dirty parts. Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” for instance, remains a luminous meditation on life’s fleetingness, set against the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia — and also has the all the juicy details of our hero’s voluminous sex life. My new novel portrays a young boy’s emotional, heteroflexible sex life — and I’d like young people to read it. The books I read as a teenager, sex and all, made me a better boy and then a better man, just as literature continues to make me a better husband, a better father, a better feminist.

Source: New York Times July 29, 2017 20:26 UTC