God's mysterious ways …

…Charming Billy and Me | City Journal. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Returning to a book that you love can be risky. Time and experience distort memory. A reader matures, his perspective changes, but the other members of McDermott’s holy trinity—writer and narrator—remain as they always were, preserved between paper covers in black and white. When I read Charming Billy again, a decade had passed since the whimpering conclusion of my Hollywood adventure. I’d practically become a different person in the intervening years. My politics had changed, as had my career ambitions. I’d married and fathered a child. I was on my way back to the Catholic Church. Feeling the weight of expectation, dreading the possibility of failure, I was again in the market for something on which to anchor myself.