I figured it would be an easy obligation to fulfill. I figured she’d want to talk, as people so often do, especially lonesome people, who often talk volubly even to complete strangers about things that have nothing to do with the listener. I expected she’d probably talk about herself, about her long life, her memories of the past, and I wouldn’t have to fake attention, because other people’s lives, and specifically their remembrance of things past, are a source of genuine interest to me. I think it’s largely true, what I once heard a famous playwright say, that there are no truly stupid human beings, no uninteresting human lives, and that you’d discover this if you were willing to sit and listen to people. But sometimes you had to be willing to sit for a very long time. It always amazes me now to think back to when I was an adolescent, and to remember how little attention my friends and I paid to one another’s parents and grandparents. What could they possibly have to say, these ordinary people, most of whom, if they weren’t housewives or retirees, went to work every day at jobs we couldn’t imagine being the least bit interesting. It was only later that it occurred to me that these were people who’d lived through some of the most dramatic events of the century. They themselves had come of age during periods of upheaval, had endured all types of hardship, had escaped harrowing conditions in foreign countries, or in the Deep South, become homeless during the Depression, fought in world wars, been held captive in prisons, survived death camps. They had been through some of the most extreme things life can throw at a person, like characters in the movies we saw, but although we might have had some vague idea of this, from those movies, say, compared to what kind of clothes or makeup your girlfriends were wearing, it could not provoke the slightest curiosity. My friends and I hung on one another’s every word, we were transfixed by the minutiae of our BF’s experiences, no matter that they were all but identical to our own. I had a classmate whose father had worked for J. Edgar Hoover, another whose mother was an ER nurse. These people had stories—the same kind of stories that had us rapt in front of the TV night after night. But we wouldn’t have dreamed of engaging them in conversation, and if they’d ever started talking openly about themselves we would have died.

Later still, though, I realized that, even among themselves, with other grown-ups, including those closest to them, most of these people were not at all eager to talk about the past, especially the traumatic parts. Who wanted to remember? Who wanted to hear? Only those who are writers, it seems, get to say what happened.