Hey, Meg Wolitzer! Please shut up about your Puritanical hang-ups, check yourself into therapy, and get over yourself. The notion that novelists should refrain from writing about sex because, heaven forbid, their children might grow up and be permanently mortified is one of the kookiest, New Agey, and self-affirmative dollops of bullshit I’ve heard of since the Quirkyalone movement.

The true “horror” here is seeing someone obsess so much about the naughty bits that her parents wrote. Most of us in the real world have no problem coming to terms with the idea that other family members not only have sex, but, if they happen to be novelists, happen to write about this very seminal aspect (no pun intended) of the human condition, among many other things. If Meg Wolitzer is indeed “a novelist,” then she should understand that the subconscious is very different from the conscious, that a parent should probably be judged on their maternal and paternal gestures rather than their novels, and that characters do not necessarily reflect the total beings of their authors.

Or to put it another way: if Wolitzer’s looking for fey titiliation, then maybe she might want to incorporate Jude Law, a vat of chocolate fudge, three hermaphrodite midgets, leather chaps, and plenty of rope instead of Mommy’s Dirty Novel.