The first interview for this book was supposed to be about desire.

I came to it with an argument. Human beings possess impulses that are older and more durable than the rules we build around them. A society can restrain those impulses, redirect them, profit from them, or condemn them. It cannot make them disappear by declaring them unacceptable.

I expected to defend that claim in the abstract.

Then the conversation turned toward my own life.

Desire was no longer a force acting somewhere out in the species. It was present in the way I noticed another person, the fears I carried into intimacy, the moral language I had inherited, and the choices I made when care and appetite did not point in exactly the same direction. The theory had not become false. It had become inconveniently personal.