The Novel That Became a Different Book When I Became a Parent

I read The Road at 26 and found it a devastating and beautifully written novel about surviving the end of the world. I reread it at 38, two years after having a child, and it was not the same book. Every scene about the father protecting the boy, every decision about what to carry and what to leave behind, every moment when the father considers the pistol and what it is for, all of these had a weight that the earlier version of me could not have accessed. I sat with the book closed afterward for a long time.