This week in the magazine, Mendelsohn writes about his boyhood correspondence with the novelist Mary Renault. Here Mendelsohn talks with Sasha Weiss about how Renault's novels helped him negotiate his own sexuality, and also led to his career as a writer and classicist. Mendelsohn also talks about how his own criticism, which brings a classicists perspective to bear on modern culture, shares similar goals as Renault's novelizations of ancient Greece.