When you are raised in a town where the grown-ups wear masks and dance at Mardi Gras parades, it plants a certain optimism for the human experiment.

One autumn morning in 1992, over breakfast in Manhattan, I had just been interviewed on national television for my new book, Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children. The man picking up the tab, Doubleday’s religious publishing director Tom Cahill, said gently: “I know you have more information, but I hope for your own good that you pursue other topics.”

Trailed by thoughts along those very lines, I nodded appreciatively, but held back on sharing my fascination for jazz funerals.