Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews

…in the Washington Post. Personally, I think 1965 is probably going back too far to find dirt, and teenage hijinks blah blah blah.

That being said, I have always agreed with my countryman Robertson Davies on the primacy of our own truest identity in childhood. ‘As we neared our sixties,’ his most famous narrator said, ‘the cloaks we had wrapped about our essential selves were wearing thin.’

If your teenage hijinks blah blah involved using your power to be needlessly cruel to the weak, that means something. It doesn’t have to mean everything, but I am more disturbed if you claim not to remember it at all. It’s telling that the other boys not only remember it, but seem to think about it every day.