The book that beckoned me from the closet was a bittersweet memoir by J.R. Ackerley, My Father and Myself. Books have been my retreat, my instructors, since I was a good churchgoing boy at my public library, nervously flipping through What’s Happening to My Body books for the dick illustrations. Later I had the luxury of working for one of the best bookstores in the world, Elliott Bay Book Company, at a pivotal time in my life. Ackerley, with his pink spine and iconic New York Review of Books cover design, practically reached from the shelf and tapped me on the shoulder.
I read his memories urgently, escaping into his life when my own threatened to overwhelm me with religious baggage. The casual nature with which he says to his father, “I don’t mind telling you. I went to meet a sailor friend,” and his father replies, “It’s all right, old boy. I prefer not to know. So long as you enjoyed yourself, that’s the main thing”—in the 1920s no less!—finally opened me up to the possibility of having that conversation myself…