"Luca Carcera is twelve years old in 1962, growing up in a comfortable Italian American neighborhood in Massachusetts, when his father suddenly moves out of the house under mysterious circumstances and surfaces across town, in a run-down rooming house, living with another man. In the aftermath of his parents' separation, Luca finds himself shocked as well by his mother's burgeoning sexuality as she longs for male companionship. And what about Luca's own sexual awakening?

Is his unusually intense friendship with a boy at school merely a weapon with which to get back at his father? And yet he's also drawn to his pretty, female next-door neighbor. Overwhelmed by the sheer power of sex to shatter the status quo, Luca shuts down.".

"By the time Luca reaches adulthood, intimacy has become the watchword in relationships; men are expected to explore their own emotional terrain. The old world of Luca's father's generation, in which men can hide behind their material successes, has vanished. Luca enters his own marriage harboring a sexual secret that, in the early 1960s, might have remained a secret; but that's no longer an option.

And when Luca gets a startling phone call from someone in his past, he is forced to truly see his most private self, even to hold it up to his wife's gaze. He confronts, in the most painful way, the strictly demarcated boundaries of male sexuality. For his own good and for the good of his marriage, he must press past those boundaries to redefine what it is to be a man."--BOOK JACKET.