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The party was in a dozy subdivision. I went to be nice. The hostess was a woman I liked; we were hovering on the doorstep between acquaintanceship and friendship. The party was typical of my safe island: a lot of voluble, smart, still-beautiful women chatting and cackling away; a few softer-spoken …

When men have existential crises—when Richard Ford, for instance, limns the male at midlife—it doesn’t get called by some dumb hormonal name. It’s a “universal human experience.”

We were walking down the bare brown slope of Baldwin Hill, a hill where we walked pretty often but whose name we could never remember, so we insisted upon calling it Bernal Heights (the name of another bare brown hill, this one in San Francisco), which made us laugh at our own dottiness. The hill o…

That night as I fell asleep I thought about Victoria. “Thought” is a strong word. What I did was, I felt. It was rare for a friend to make me feel. And what I felt was that I wanted her friendship. A strong wanting. The kind of wanting I usually reserved for sex and love. Now it was coming, bam, in…

“Sometimes life is a thing of determination,” I wrote in my diary that first winter when I returned to school. “And when you are determined, you are free.” Too right, mate. I looked like a bigger fuckup than ever: the heavy blackout drinking, the promiscuity, the mad butter eating. But my life had …