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 overlooked the gray gutter of the Los Angeles River. I had been trying to write about being young and finding it painfully difficult. I was tormented by the question of identity in a way I never had been before. It confused me, the way reading coming-of-age memoirs often confused me. A problem of narration. Who was telling the story of young Claire? Asking this question made me feel like I was floating in space. I thought about Geoff Dyer’s writing, and the way he often situates himself in the present day before he engages in nostalgia or memory.

“It’s like he’s in a room, writing, and he tells you about the room, and once that’s established, then you go with him wherever he takes you into the past, and you’re willing to go there with him because you know where he’s writing from. It all makes sense because of that.”

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.”