NEARLY TWO YEARS AGO, writer Michael Chabon learned an important lesson about parenting from his son Abe’s fashion choices. Kids at his school were teasing Abe, then 13, for the unusual way he dressed—he liked to wear bow ties, cardigans and fedoras—but the taunts only motivated Abe to push his inventive wardrobe further.
“I admired him for not surrendering, and in time I came to understand the nature of my job as the father of this sartorial wild child,” writes Mr. Chabon in his new collection of autobiographical essays,...