I thought I’d recover from my skull-poisoning and everything would go back to normal, shipshape, better than ever, really! Redemption would have straightened out all the strangeness, like “ah yes, I get it now, this was all for something.” I mean, if there’s no arc, what’s the point? You just felt bad and then you felt less bad? That’s it ?

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Maybe what’s at work is a kind of interior slut-shaming—if I suggest that such a damaging moment was the cause of my sexual activeness, then I disavow any good feelings I might have around my own sexuality. In other words, victimhood came to shape my own concept of my sexuality. When I sat down to write a memoir of my adolescent sex life, for

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