Sacks’s mother, a surgeon in London, had suspected that her son was gay when he was a teen-ager. She declared that homosexuality was an “abomination,” using the phrase “filth of the bowel” and telling him that she wished he’d never been born. They didn’t speak of the subject again. Sacks had moved to America—first to California and then, after five years, to New York—because, he wrote in his journal, “I wanted a sexual and moral freedom I felt I could never have in England.” That fall, during Yom Kippur, he decided that, rather than going to synagogue to confess “to the total range of human sin,” a ritual he’d grown up with, he’d spend the night at a bar, enjoying a couple of beers. “What I suppose I am saying, Jenö, is that I now feel differently about myself, and therefore about homosexuality as a whole,” he wrote. “I am through with cringing, and apologies, and pious wishes that I might have been ‘normal.’ ” (The Oliver Sacks Foundation shared with me his correspondence and other records, as well as four decades’ worth of journals—many of which had not been read since he wrote them.)journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter