Part IMy mother liked to say Freud should have been strangled in his crib. Not that she had ever read one line of the eminent psychoanalyst's writing or knew anything about his life and times. She probably thought he was a German; she might have gotten his actual dates wrong by half a century. She didn't know about the Oedipus complex or the mechanics of repression, but she knew that when children turned out badly, when they were conflicted and miserable and did poorly in school, Freud blamed the mother. This was arrant nonsense, Mother declared. Children turned out the way they turned out and mothers were as surprised as anyone else. Her own strategy for child rearing had been to show no interest at all in how her children turned out, so how could she be held responsible for them?

Proof of Mother's assertions might be found in the relatively normal men her four sons grew to be, not a pervert or a criminal among us, though my oldest brother, Claude, a dentist, has always shown far too much interest in crime fiction of the most violent and degraded sort, and my profession, while honest, is doubtless, in some quarters, suspect. For the other two, Mother got her doctor and lawyer, the only two professions her generation ever recommended. My brothers' specialties have the additional benefit of being banal: the doctor is a urologist and the lawyer handles real estate closings.

My mother was a tall, beautiful woman, with dark hair, fair skin, an elegant long neck, and excellent posture. She was poorly educated and, as a young mother, intensely practical. My father had various jobs in the civil service in Stamford; his moves were sometimes lateral, occasionally up. She hardly seemed to notice him when we were around, but there must have been some spark between them. She had her sons in sets, the first two a year apart, a five-year lapse, and then two more. I was the last, her last effort--this was understood by all--to have a girl.

Even if Freud hadn't encouraged me to, I think I would still have to blame Mother for my craving to be someone else, and not only because she wasn't satisfied with who I am, though she wasn't, not from the start. My middle name is Leslie and that's what I was called at home; I became Edward when I went away to boarding school in Massachusetts. Mother had "gender issues," but none of us realized how serious they were until after she died. This mournful event took place when I was nineteen, a freshman at the University of North Carolina, and it was preceded by a seismic upheaval that lasted six months, during which time Mother left my father for a woman named Helen, who was ten years her junior and bent on destruction.

Mother wasn't naturally a warm person--I know that now--and she must have been lonely and frustrated for years, surrounded from dawn to dark, as she was, by the unlovely spectacle of maleness. A frequent expression upon entering a room in which her sons were engaged in some rude or rowdy masculine behavior was "Why are boys so . . ." As the youngest, I took this to heart and tried to please her, not without some success. I kept my corner of the bedroom spotless, made my bed with the strict hospital corners she used on her own, rinsed my dishes at the sink after the pot roast, meat loaf, or fried chicken dinner, and expressed an interest in being read to. I wasn't picky about the stories, either; tales of girlish heroism were fine with me, hence my acquaintance with the adventures of such heroines as Nancy Drew, the Dana Girls, and all the travails of the shrewdly observant Laura in the Little House books. I know, as few men do, my fairy tales, from Rumpelstiltskin to the Little Goose Girl, stories certainly...