Finding Private Roy

By the late 1970s, when I attended public high school in rural, blue-collar Central New York, more and more teenagers were living with a divorced parent and a stepparent—meaning, since mothers were almost always granted custody, with stepfathers. Their stories tended to erode the sugar-coating about blended families found in The Brady Bunch and other confections. Some of these stepfathers were awful. A few were monsters. Long before sociology taught us about the importance of intact homes for children, the battered lives of some of my friends amounted to a Q.E.D. all its own.

Yet statistics don’t reveal every truth. My own parents divorced soon after I was born. My mother remarried when I was five, which means that for most of my childhood and adolescence I had a stepfather, too. But he was as far from being an ogre as a man can be...