But my primal vision of journalism, I tell her, arrived in the form of my uncle’s girlfriend. All my family had entered into sensible marriages by their early twenties, but my uncle remained a bachelor. He was a simple, handsome man, borderline beautiful, and he often punched above his weight with women, at least for a while, until they figured out the only thing he understood deeply was the roster of the Dodgers.

“For a couple months, when I was maybe eleven or twelve, he dated a reporter,” I say. “He always brought new girlfriends over to see my mother, to show them off or gain approval. I remember the first time I saw her, it was like she’d touched down from another planet. She worked for KTLA, her hair immaculately sprayed. Everything she said struck me like a psychic blast, like there could be no higher form of life.”

Even then, I could tell the reporter didn’t like coming by our house. She didn’t like Mom and me—at all. In our backyard, she’d sit beneath the jacaranda tree, drinking gin and soda, and smoking, watching us from behind her Ray-Bans. But I secretly adored her. I think I admired her contempt for us. It hinted at a world beyond the tightly controlled zone of my mother.

One day she rattled the ice in her glass at me. I looked back at the house, but Mom was in the kitchen with my uncle. I approached, wanting to scale the cold peak of her sophistication.

“Do you know what this is?” she asked, holding out the sweaty glass.

“Your glass.”

“Will you fill it for me?”

“With what?”

“On the counter, there’s a bright-blue bottle and a silver can. Give me this much from the bottle,” she said, holding her pointer finger and thumb at maximum distance, “and a little splash from the can.”

I took the glass in both hands and made for the sliding door. I looked down into the glass, so transfixed by spent lime on watery ice, the kiss of lipstick on the rim, that I didn’t put one foot before the other, and tripped. The ice spewed over the earth and the glass fell and broke.

I glanced back at her, horrified. In this house, you didn’t make mistakes like this, out of control. But she was smiling, inexplicably, and I started to laugh.

The door slid open: “Whitney.”

Mom saw the broken glass and muttered, “Bimbo.” I don’t know which one of us she meant.

Not long after that, I saw the reporter on TV, on the steps of a courthouse. She wore a perfect deadpan, an objective face, personifying the public record. I tried to set my face like that and picture myself on assignment, the satellite dish unfolding from the news van like a huge venomous flower.

“From then on, I told people I was going to be a journalist.”