Ms. Z wrote books about things like women having sex and women getting old and old women having sex. She worked a hefty lecture circuit and I wrote her speeches. I interviewed inspirational single women and inspirational married women and inspirational anorexic women and inspirational suicidal women—or rather, women who had considered suicide and turned away. I also booked her Jitney tickets and took out cash from ATMs so she could pay her several cleaning women, none of whom were legal.

One day she had a pre-interview over the phone for a television appearance. It was a talk show about aging. Aging! The show came with punctuation.

I listened to her voice piping aphorisms like song lyrics into the phone downstairs: “It’s not about staying young. It’s about loving old.”

She called me down afterward. “Book my Botox,” she said. “I’m not going on TV without it.”

I heard her say this, and then, almost immediately, I heard the echo of how I’d repeat it to other people. And I did repeat it, on that night and other ones. I put on high heels and walked a mile through rainy streets to a cocktail party underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. I arrived and opened my mouth to drink and speak. “Guess what my boss said?”

I told friends, acquaintances, strangers, anyone who would listen. It didn’t matter if you knew me or not. The anecdote worked either way. This was New York. Telling stories wasn’t about talking to anyone in particular, it was just about talking. Something had happened to you that might capture another person’s attention. It was lonely, this kind of speaking. The truth of being young felt like an ugly secret everyone had agreed to keep.

Every night I said things like: Today my boss and I got drunk at lunch. Today my boss was on Oprah! Today I spent a thousand dollars on gift baskets. Today I used the word “autumnal” twice, and both times I was speaking to tulip salesmen.

The places where I said these things mattered as much as saying them. The facts and feelings of my life were only as important as the places where they caught in my throat. The Pegu Club, the SKINnY, Milk and Honey, Marlow & Sons and the Slaughtered Lamb and Kettle of Fish and the Dove and Freemans and the arepas place off First and a coffee shop called Think, and a restaurant called Snack, and a restaurant called Home.

We all stayed out late because we knew we were supposed to, spinning the furious and elegant yarns of cowards. We stretched our lives like taffy on racks. We found the grave and humorous correlations between our lives and the lives of celebrities, the course of unjust wars, the third world and its charlatan leaders, the globe and its various Achilles heels—the oceans, the atmosphere. We made fun and then we stopped making fun, quite abruptly, to show we knew how to take things seriously. We ate well. We talked about the food; we talked about the food we weren’t eating—in other restaurants, other boroughs. We talked about sadness, how we’d never really known it. We talked about genocides that people had forgotten because they only talked about the holocaust. We talked about ourselves, mainly, and who we were fucking.