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I just finished what has been perhaps the most profound and moving book I’ve ever read: “Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story” (1992) by the late Paul Monette.

I came across the book randomly in a used bookstore in Rockville last fall. Thank God it won a National Book Award. The edition I happened across heralds that on its cover. Otherwise I’d have dismissed it as one more of the thousands of gay junk books that multiply like Tribbles in the Blade’s newsroom, 99 percent of which (OK, maybe 95) are complete shit.

Those of you who’ve read either “Man” or Monette’s other non-fiction classic “Borrowed Time: an AIDS Memoir” (which I haven’t gotten to yet) know what I’m talking about. Monette is among that most gifted kind of memoirist — reading his words makes you feel doubly alive as if he’s both sitting across a table from you telling you his story but you’re also simultaneously present in the past that he’s describing.

As enthralled as I am by Monette, I don’t know that his appeal would be universal. I doubt, for instance, that straight readers would feel the same connection to his life story that I felt. Similarly I doubt an evocatively written memoir by, say, a Holocaust survivor would strike the same chord with me it would for someone who’d spent time in a concentration camp. Sure, some of the horror would transcend the inability to relate, but some wouldn’t.

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