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Remember that for years, when I was a very young man, every time I entered a bed where a girl was waiting for me I’d be entering a courtroom where I’d lost many decisions. Doesn’t every culprit wish to turn the tables on his judge, deflate his eminence, show him up, kill him? Wasn’t it natural, sin…

I generalized from this disaster that the most precious things in life were forbidden by authority (my father) and that everything I wanted most I would have to obtain secretly. I learned to conceal my longings and to work to fulfill them surreptitiously. I stopped feeling guilty about the beautifu…

I spent afternoons after school in the stacks of the New Rochelle Public Library, reading books that might explain the intimate problems of my life. Or in the movie houses. Movies became my passion. They were dreams, like my dreams. I didn’t have money, so I found a way to sneak into Loews New Roch…

WHEN Father had first come to America, he must have felt that he was still in a hostile and threatening environment—after all, he could not speak the language—so he continued to behave in New York as he had among the Turks, guarding himself to be circumspect, always beyond criticism on the streets …

But now I knew I had to have help; my life was a mess. My second analyst was tall, grave, and austere and, as far as I knew, had no woman. At my urging, he was ruthless with me—that is, truthful. His observations sometimes reached the level of contempt. But I swallowed my resentment: I’d asked for …