Lurking right there in the open stacks of my suburban public library was enough smut to blow my impressionable 13-year-old mind. My life changed the day I spied Anaïs Nin's "Delta of Venus" on a shelf in the fiction section. I quizzically studied the photograph on the cover. It showed a girl in strange clothing contorted on an old armchair, her dress hiked up to her hips, revealing a stocking attached to a lacy undergarment. "Erotica" the cover said. I cracked open the book to see what was inside.

Down the rabbit hole I fell into Nin's world of courtesans, artists, showgirls, lecherous old men, voyeurs, prostitutes and cheeky schoolgirls, all cavorting in a European world of shabby gentility. I felt a twinge of excitement wash over me. I'd found a dirty book, but not like those my mother hid in the cubbyhole of her headboard, like "Forever Amber" or "Princess Daisy." My literature radar began to whir. I sensed that there was something more to this book than cheap thrills.

Beautiful smut in hand, I glanced around to see if I was about to get caught by a disapproving librarian. As an adolescent I was unaware that most librarians abhor censorship, and one of them had probably put that book in the general collection for a reason. I felt like a secret agent finding clues to my next assignment in the middle of a public space. I put "Delta of Venus" in my "keep" pile and glanced back up at the shelf.

Sandwiched between V.S. Naipaul and Larry Niven was a companion volume by the same author, "Little Birds." That cover photograph was even more interesting: a girl (woman?) of indeterminate age poised as if sitting in a chair -- only there was no chair there. She had a big bow in her hair and wore a short baby-doll dress that was magically suspended straight out to her sides. She rested her chin on her hands and exhibited an unmistakable "come hither" stare. I placed the book face down on my pile should my mother come to see what I was up to.

I was full of questions. I was drawn to the compelling cover photographs as much as to the words inside. Instinctively, I knew Nin's stories belonged to another era, but I didn't know which. The books' copyrights were recent. I felt as if I were gazing through a keyhole into another world. I longed to throw open the door, cross the threshold and don one of those unusual outfits myself.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow describes what he calls a "peak experience," a seemingly mundane moment in which a sudden insight takes you to a higher plane of understanding about the world and your presence in it. Discovering Anaïs Nin in my public library at the tender age of 13 was my peak experience. Not only had I found words to sate the extraordinary appetite of my raging hormones, but also awakened in me was a thirst for knowledge about the world, a way to put all the disparate elements of this literary mystery in front of me -- these strange images, this European miasma -- into their proper context. This chance encounter at my local library did what no teacher in eight years of public education could do: It made me care about art, literature and history.

Suddenly, I knew there was more to life than the strip malls and subdivisions that were popping up overnight in my Midwestern suburb. There was more to life than school, movies, television, records and shopping. "Delta of Venus" and "Little Birds" were about sex, but not the kind of sex the high school kids had in the backs of cars or at home while their parents were in Florida. Nin's tales of sex were woven into a shimmering blanket of unfamiliar cultural mores. Sex for her characters came naturally, in the way one would visit the baker, or stroll along the Seine, or clip a stocking to a garter.

Sex was not crass or defiant; it was part of life. Sure, sometimes it was risky or forbidden, like in her story "The Woman on the Dunes," which describes a woman who allows herself to be taken from behind by a stranger at a public execution, but above all it was pleasurable. If you kept your eyes open for eroticism, Nin implied, soon enough it would scamper out of the bushes and start nibbling from your hand. Having been steeped in American culture too long, I found this idea revelatory and could barely wait to pursue it.