Rafael Yglesias’ new novel, The Wisdom of Perversity, will be published March 24.

Perhaps I shouldn’t admit to a prospective reader that I wrote the first draft of The Wisdom of Perversity in 1998, that it took another sixteen years and four more drafts before it was finished to my or anyone else’s satisfaction. The novel that Algonquin is publishing in March 2015 is substantially different from the original manuscript in many ways. It’s two hundred pages shorter. Over half of the remaining passages were reconceived; many were rewritten entirely. The revisions were made to clarify and refine my understanding of The Wisdom of Perversity’s delicate subject matter: the long-term effects of being sexually misused as a child—as I was when I was eight years old. But those revisions do not account for the greatest change I perceive between the way readers responded to the 1998 version and the way they react to the book you can read today. The sharpest difference is in how they respond to the roughly forty percent of the novel that hasn’t changed at all.

Those unrevised passages are written from the point of view of three children, two eight-year-old boys and an eleven-year-old girl, while they are being seduced and bullied by a forty-year-old pedophile. The pedophile’s method of rape is to seduce. I label any sexual activity of an adult with a child as rape, whether or not it involves penetration, since it is always nonconsensual. Those passages, written as if you are in the skin of the children, vividly depict that the predator’s technique is seductive and that the children-victims are initially turned on by their rapist’s insinuating touch. The point of the passage is that what makes the effects of molestation so long-lasting is the confusion it creates for the victims, that their first experience of sexual pleasure from another person happens without either their desire or understanding. The novel gives voice to a childhood trauma that is usually summarized in medical and legal jargon, well-intended language that unfortunately obscures what is most persistently destructive about the crime.

Sixteen years ago the reaction of most readers was to be in a hurry to tell me they despise pedophiles. They still do, of course, but encouraged, I believe, by almost daily news accounts of a variety of sexual assaults on children, a majority now tell me stories.

A middle-aged man tells me about a female babysitter who repeatedly stalked him as he was starting puberty until he was finally bullied into intercourse. A woman in her seventies whose father’s best friend kept ambushing and fondling her explains that she believes keeping it secret, fighting off the predator without assistance, led her to be excellent in business dealings but too detached to have successful romantic relationships. Most of the stories — I hear them so routinely I’ve come to expect them — are of acts that left no medical evidence and that the victims at the time did not recognize as rape, sexual assault, or even molestation. The absence of penetration is one reason many did not consider themselves victims of an assault, especially those who, like the characters in my novels, experienced some sensation, no matter how briefly, of sexual excitement. Like the characters in my novel none told their parents at the time. They lived with the secret and in some cases continue to, not sure even as adults exactly what the secret is that they are keeping.

My research sample is small, not scientific, but I am convinced my generation suffered an epidemic of child sexual misuse that went untreated and unexamined, and in some respects is still poorly understood. The Wisdom of Perversity doesn’t have answers about prevention or enforcement or how to make precise distinctions between memory and legal fact. It seeks to do what fiction does best: place the reader inside the consciousness of another, to live with three characters who have experienced what most people consider to be an unmentionable and unthinkable crime and who have struggled for decades to forget and regain control of their ability to feel pleasure.

I wrote on and off for nearly two decades to get it right in the hope that victims and those who love them can better understand how to speak of the unmentionable, how to think about the unthinkable, and how to live in a present no longer haunted by the past.