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Time is meaningful – think of it that way. Generations define us, perhaps not as strongly as other identities – class, religion, gender, profession, politics, nation – but in ways that may be among the most fixed. ‘He tore me away from my generation, but I was not part of his,’ Annie Ernaux writes …

[...] She’d always assumed her mother was averse to abstract or speculative thought, but she became doubtful of this assumption now as she remembered how often she’d seen her mother reading in Tamil when she was younger, newspapers, magazines, novels, and biographies, anything she could get her han…

INTERVIEWER

Will you tell me about your relationship with Carl?

HOWE

That would be fine. Especially now that we’re both almost dead, it’s a good time to talk about what happened. Nothing was the same after we met. I mean, it was 1967, the civil rights movement was exploding. That was the …

INTERVIEWER

There’s a story in Forty Whacks in which the narrator is writing to a shrink. Did you go see one?

HOWE

I’ve never been a shrink person myself, but I did go briefly because I was ordered to.

INTERVIEWER

Hence the irreverent tone.

HOWE

Well, I never stopped wisecrac…

Well, he would go off to the lab, and I would scribble away and type and read. I had written short little novels that were like bad dreams, and randomly I wrote to an agent and sent him one of my manuscripts, because I had enough shame in me to know I had to make money for myself. He said I had to …