Seth Lerer's moving memoir Prospero's Son is rooted in the age-old problem of the fraught relationship between fathers and sons. But at the same time, it is about the power of books and theater, the excitement of stories in a young man's life, and the transformative magic of words and performance. A flamboyantly performative father, a teacher and lifelong actor, comes to terms with his life as a gay man. A bookish boy becomes a professor of literature and an acclaimed expert on the very children's books that set him on his path in the first place. And when that boy grows up, he learns how hard it is to be a father and just how much books can - and cannot - instruct him. Throughout these intertwined accounts of changing selves, Lerer returns again and again to stories - the ways they teach us about discovery, deliverance, forgetting, and remembering.