It was a bright spring afternoon, the kind that reminds you that France is still worth the trouble. And I was on the road, which in itself was a small antidote to my boredom. I had the window of my Renault down—the Paris bureau still had a car, even though we didn’t have any news—and I was sailing along through the Bois de Vincennes, past the tall shade trees that guarded the edge of the park. On the seat next to me was a stack of scientific papers my news aide had gathered, summarizing the latest developments in neurobiology. Forty-eight hours before, I had known absolutely nothing about these subjects. I still knew nothing, really, but over the years I had developed a powerful ability to fake it, if given the smallest amount of raw material. We journalists are skilled impostors; that is one of our trade secrets.

The car radio was on; the French announcer was rattling away the day’s news. Sports scores, the latest from the Balkans, a bulletin about police being summoned to deal with a disturbance in the Rue Lamennais, off the Champs-Élysées. All of it sounded far away. I was driving too fast, which is almost required in France, and I was feeling a sensation I often have when I’m on the way to a story—a sense of possibility, a sense that the familiar is about to give way to the unexpected. The chance of such encounters—even when becalmed on the glassy sea of boredom—was what made my job bearable. That was the game of journalism—waiting patiently for your shot, and then nailing it—and I had always been proficient at games, ever since I was a boy in northern California.

We’re all shaped and misshaped by the experiences of our childhoods. Mine was happy and uncomplicated, which was itself a kind of burden—the burden of lightness. People with emotional scars know they have to be wary; they learn to ration their passions; they know what will hurt them. Nothing in my childhood taught me those lessons. My father was a professor of medicine at the University of California at Davis, and I grew up in the never-again idyll of California in the 1960s and ’70s. We had a big house and a pool, a horse for my sister and a tennis court for me. And what I mostly did until my eighteenth year was to hit tennis balls. Thousands of them, pounding them down the line, crosscourt, forehand, backhand, slice, topspin. Over and over, boom-boom-boom-boom, until I could place a tennis-ball can anywhere across the net and stand a reasonable chance of hitting it. That was how I spent my youth. Haight-Ashbury and its convulsions were over the mountains and into another solar system. I lived in the sun-kissed Sacramento Valley, hitting yellow tennis balls and picking oranges off the trees in our backyard.