Christopher Buckley

Pop was a devout Roman Catholic; I'm a lapsed Catholic. I'm not the village atheist, but I exert my right not to believe, and I doubt I would have been very public about that were he still alive, simply just so as not to hurt his feelings.

My dad's one true quest in life was for the Platonic ideal of peanut butter. And I remember one day he announced, with a look of utter transfiguration on his face, that he had found paradise on Earth in a jar with a yellow cap. And it was called Red Wing.

One of the things that struck me about the 1870s, which we still haven't nearly addressed, is what to do about the male-female divide. One of the forbidden topics is when men own up to the omnivorousness of their sexual interest and how to square that with being in love with an individual woman.