MAN CHILD

Raising a boy in a world of male monsters.

- ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ

Life so often rhymes with reading; what happens on the page primes our expectations for what we’ll find beyond it. So, a few weeks ago, as I was sitting on a sidewalk bench with “Directions to Myself ” (Hogarth), Heidi Julavits’s new memoir, it seemed inevitable that a posse of teen-age boys should come strutting down the avenue, jostling and preening for their own benefit and that of the neighborhood at large. “I’m not listening to your bitch ass,” one shouted at his friend, before glancing at me and sheepishly correcting himself: “—your ass.” It was an oddly tender thing, this boy the size and shape of a man tempering his bluster lest his use of the word “bitch” offend me, a stranger who belonged to the category to which it refers, when he meant only to demean his friend by association. Some inner voice had spoken up and told him to tone it down. Maybe it was his mother’s.