Michael Chabon - Manhood for Amateurs

Autobiographical ssays from Manhood for Amateurs in the weekend glossies:

What do you tell your kids when they ask about your past?
Drugs, sex, what the Beatles really meant… the only response to those awkward questions your kids will ask is honesty, says Michael Chabon

"THE FIRST PERSON I ever saw smoking pot was my mother, some time around 1977 or so, sitting in the front seat of her friend Kathy's car, passing a little metal pipe back and forth before we went in to see a movie at the Westview in Catonsville, Maryland. I have a dim sense that at 14 I neither disapproved of nor felt any surprise at this behaviour, leading me to conclude that my mother already must have told me, prepared me with the information, that she was "experimenting" with pot (because that was all it ever amounted to for her – a brief reagent test conducted within the beaker of her new status as a single woman in the great wild laboratory of the 1970s)... "

More at http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2010/feb/28/talking-to-kids-drugs-sex-michael-chabon

An ideal father
It was love at first sight for Michael Chabon and his father-in-law. So what would become of their relationship once his marriage started to crumble?

"I did like her, as it turned out. She had an eye for furniture and flowers, a rich history of weird sex, weird jobs and weird scenes. Most important for me, she had expectations of how a man ought to act and speak and shoulder his obligations, and in the three years of our marriage I learned how to be a husband. But she was often miserable – sometimes justi­fiably, usually for no reason at all – and in a short period of time I found that I was miserable, too. There were operatic arguments, all-night ransackings of the contents of our souls, grim grey bitter mornings. We travelled, and moved, and bought a house and acquired animals, and engaged in all the standard ploys and dodges, short of having children (thank God), employed by couples trying to outrun the shadow of that first enduring mistake..."

More at http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/feb/27/michael-chabon-father-manhood-amateurs