One of the most memorable classes began when Dad entered my bedroom with an olive-green shoebox under his arm, and said “Today’s lesson is about you.”

He took me to the park opposite our apartment building, one of those sad, neglected city parks that looked as if it had been the location of a war between children and junkies and the children got their arses kicked. Dead grass, broken slides, a couple of rubber swings drifting in the wind on tangled, rusty chains.

“Look, Jasper,” Dad said as we settled on a bench. “It’s about time you found out how your grandparents fucked up, so you can work out what you did with the failures of your antecedents: did you run with them or ricochet against their errors, instead making your own huge gaffes in an opposing orbit? We all crawl feebly away from our grandparents’ graves with their sad act of dying ringing in our ears, and in our mouths we have the aftertaste of their grossest violation against themselves: the shame of their unlived lives. It’s only the steady accumulation of regrets and failures and our shame or our unlived lives that opens the door to understanding them. If by some quirk of fate we led charmed lives, bounding energetically from one masterful success to another, we’d never understand them! Never!”

He opened the shoebox. “I want you to look at something,” Dad said, scooping out a pile of loose photographs. “This is your grandfather,” he continued, holding up a black-and-white picture of a young man with a beard leaning against a streetlamp. The man wasn’t smiling; it looked like he was leaning on that streetlamp for fear of falling.