Midway through Brighton Beach Memoirs, the first play of Neil Simon’s autobiographical trilogy, the playwright has his fictional stand-in make a confession directly to the audience. “How am I going to become a writer,” asks Eugene Morris Jerome, just shy of 15 and already full of artistic yearning, “if I don’t know how to suffer?”
In ...

We were driving up the New York Thruway, my mother and I, wearing sunglasses, tanning our arms out the window, listening to Top 40 on the car radio. The song playing just then was called “In the Year 2525,” by a previously obscure duo named Zager and Evans, and it had risen to a hit more by lucky timing than tuneful hooks. In July 1969, as Apollo 11 hurtled toward the moon, the song prophesied the future of humankind. We were heading toward the summer camp where my sister Carol was being driven to despair. On this day, my mother would decide whether to accede to Carol’s pleas and bring her home.