In a family, there’s no distinction as pronounced as the one between those who fit and those who won’t. Ours was an unreasonably masculine household. Reared by a single father and his ultra-macho brethren, in a working-class New Jersey town improbably named Manville, I was a bad match for so much strutting testosterone: too small, too bookish, too nursing of my myriad fragilities.

Manfully nourished by his own brash father, brought up with boxing, wrestling, and motorcycling, my father raised my brother and me on Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris movies: Fists of Fury, Return of the Dragon, The Octagon, Lone Wolf McQuade. He said to me one morning, Chuck Norris’s autobiography in hand: “Bruce Lee was small but Chuck Norris says he was pound for pound the strongest man he’s ever known.” I hear that line now as the incitation it must have been, as my father’s particular means of encouragement. He tried to interest me in wrestling, in karate, in football. They didn’t take.

Still, despite my many weaknesses, I made attempts to mesh with my family’s masculinity. Soon I was enthralled by ninjas, lithe but mighty ninjas, after I was somehow allowed to see those staples of the 1980s ninja-movie craze, Enter the Ninja and Revenge of the Ninja, cyclones of cinematic violence starring Sho Kosugi. But my grandfather, the motorcycling and weightlifting patriarch of my family, would point and chide when, donning a ninja suit, I stealthily darted from tree to tree. Of course the Asian man was too feminine, too hairless, for my grandfather’s burly standards. When I tried to show him a Sho Kosugi film, he mocked him: “That guy’s just a little s***. I’d knock him right over.”