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The lives of celebrated authors are often romanticized. Apparently, the real story is far more relatable -- at least the way Michael Chabon describes it in "Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son," his new collection of autobiographical essays.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Kavalier & Clay" is raw and candid in his personal reflections on the little struggles most guys face as both dads and dudes. "A lot of the essays here just have to do with problems that are specific to being a parent or just an adult looking back at the changing nature of childhood between then to now," he told Asylum in a recent interview.

But Chabon's also at his analytic and poetic best when waxing on geekier topics from his feelings about the devolution of LEGOs to his attraction to hulking female comic book hero Big Barda.

Needless to say, wordplay devoted to such topics piques Asylum's interest, so we plucked five of Chabon's experiences found in the book and asked him sum up what he learned from living through and writing about each one.

Think of it as a Cliff Notes on manhood from the author himself ...

Hot for Comic Book Characters ("A Woman of Valor")
MC: "The thing about Big Barda that so impressed me on a very unconscious level when I was a kid that I only became conscious of later as a grown man was that she really was her own woman. She had her own story of which she was the heroine. She could stand on her own two feet and fight her own battles. She was an utterly dependable ally. She did have moments of letting her guard down and exhibiting moments of tenderness and vulnerability. But what really impressed me was her independence. She didn't need a man, so she was making a deliberate choice when she chose one."

The Circumcision Decision ("The Cut")
MC: "I would only recommend circumcision if you're Jewish or Muslim. I guess there's a public health debate and the CDC is deciding whether or not to recommend it. I guess [health concerns are] why it originally became so widespread in the United States. But other than religious or health reasons, I just don't see a compelling reason to do it.

For Jews, it is an ineradicable and powerful way of saying you are a Jewish man. You're marked. For those living around the time of the Holocaust, it could even be a fatal mark. To continue to do it was almost a defiance. It's kind of like, 'We're going to keep doing it anyway. Screw you.' So it is a really powerful thing. That's ultimately why [my wife and I] chose to do it, I guess. The power was just too strong."

Admitting to the Kids You've Smoked Pot a Million Times ("D.A.R.E")
MC: "In the piece, when my son asked me how many times I did drugs, I said the answer I wanted to avoid was one million. So I told my son, 'A number of times.' That's not a lie, but it doesn't go into excessive detail. I didn't talk about the bongs I made out of big soda bottles and buckets. You don't need to immediately go into telling them about the gravity bong. Basically, if you've smoked a lot of pot, you should cop to it, but I don't think you need to go into detail.

The rule of thumb for me and my wife when our kids ask uncomfortable questions about sex or drugs or hot-button issues is to do our best to tell the truth. You might need to tailor it to be simple, but you don't want to say anything that 10, 15, 20 years later you have to say, 'No, that was a lie.' Be true, be honest. But you don't have to volunteer everything."

The Changing Shape of LEGOs ("To the Legoland Station")
MC: "When I was a kid LEGOs were these abstract formless pieces with a very limited palate and a range of shapes that you tried to make your own creation out of. Regardless of what you made, it always came out looking like LEGOs. Now, it's like a scale-model activity where you try to re-create exact replicas of Star Wars vehicles. That bothered me, but I came to the conclusion that there's something more going on now. My kids have gotten into this mash-up aesthetic now by combining different sets. It would have been impossible for me. The closest I could've come to that is having a G.I. Joe go out with my friend's sister's Barbie doll.



You really do relive your childhood when you have children. You relive it by watching them do the same things you did -- you relive the actual milestones you can remember reaching. And you relive it also in your imagination as you're contrasting things you remember that don't seem to exist anymore or that your children encounter in very different ways."

How to Feel About Having Sex With Your Mom's Friend ("Verging")
MC: "It's difficult for me to get into her mind, and it happened to me. That's because I was a 15-year-old boy myself, and even at this point what appeal I must have had is still lost on me. I'm so much older now than she was then that in retrospect she now seems young herself. But it still seems just as inexplicable and mysterious. I don't have any grudge or ill will, but it's not a super-fond memory. I guess I just wrote about it, because I never had and when I even thought about it, let alone spoke about it, it always made me flinch. It's almost a guarantee that something you write will be worth reading if it makes you uncomfortable."