Barbara Trapido’s Brother of the More Famous Jack, originally published in 1982 and reissued this year by New York Review Books, opens with its young heroine, Katherine, reading the preface of a book written by her beloved professor, Jacob Goldman:

I cannot in good conscience give the statutory thanks to my wife for helpful comments on the manuscript, patient reading of drafts or corrections to proofs, because Jane did none of these things … Going by the lavish thanks to wives which I find in the prefaces to other men’s books, I deem myself uniquely injudicious in having married a woman who refuses to double as a high-grade editorial assistant. Since custom requires me to thank her for something, I thank her instead for the agreeable fact of her continuing presence which in twenty years I have never presumed to expect.

“There is no doubt,” says Katherine, that the preface—the marriage it speaks of and the world it hints at—“influenced the paths that I chose to tread.” There are many people who would probably say the same of Brother of the More Famous Jack. I read it for the first time when I was sixteen; now, decades later, I find it nearly impossible to disentangle some of my own tastes and preferences from those expressed in the novel. Do I think that having revolting handwriting is glamorous because of Brother of the More Famous Jack, or would I have gotten there on my own? Do I think wearing an all-white outfit to play amateur tennis is embarrassing because of the novel, or does that kind of thing become obvious to all adults eventually? I began rereading the novel in preparation for this interview and realized almost immediately that I didn’t need to: I had the whole thing more or less off by heart.

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