When I ordered the blackened redfish at a North Carolina restaurant in August, I hadn’t eaten any meat or fish in more than 13 years. Being a vegetarian had been easy, and I’d rarely been tempted to stray. Sure, certain cooking aromas—a roasting turkey, chicken soup simmering on the stove top—could still make me ...

What I remember most from Norma Klein’s 1983 novel Beginner’s Love—what was, actually, seared into my impressionable young brain—is a description of 17-year-old Leda Boroff’s nipples: as seen by her prostrate boyfriend, Joel Davis, they “touched the tip of my nose, like soft flower petals.” I read the book sometime in the early ’90s, when I was telling anyone who would listen that I was a “preteen.” That scene felt momentous, and instructive.

My parents found the crumbling book, A Treasure for My Daughter, last year, while moving my 84-year-old grandmother to a new apartment. Published in Montreal in 1950, it’s a kind of textbook for Jewish womanhood, made up of recipes and instructions about major holidays and rituals. The spine of my grandmother’s copy is cracked and ...

When I was about 9 years old, my family’s Reform temple started asking congregants to identify copies of Gates of Prayer that needed some TLC: a little glue on the spine, the reattachment of a dangling cover. The books had been in use for many years, and they were getting worn. They’d seen some changes, ...