Lessons by Ian McEwan

This is a tale of sexual abuse in a young boy. In life these mostly involve young boys being raped by men, but the story here of an early teen boy and his mid-20's piano teacher is not as rare as you might think, and when I see it professionally, it has this same long shadow cast across a lifetime, with a slightly different bent from other trauma, but no less life changing. This is a life long portrayal of Roland Baines and the way a too-early sexual experience permanently stains Roland’s romantic expectations. In his aching memories of his months of endless sex, we see Miss Cornell’s perverse desires through the boy’s pride excitement. To us, she’s a fiend of manipulation, but to young Roland — adrift in a world bracing for nuclear annihilation sparked by Kennedy or Khrushchev — Miss Cornell looks like salvation itself. He drops all his academic desires at her behest and becomes a bit of a sexual slave, something he is delirious about at the time, but comes to see, eventually, as having rewired his brain differently and left him with little in the way of ability to be in an intimate relationship of any kind.