In 1986, on the first day of his 40th year, the author starts writing a "harmless memoir of my careless youth." He mimics Jack Kerouac and starts typing on butcher paper. What "flows" is a book full of boyhood memories certainly, but also a book of ideas in progress (about baseball, about fate, about writing itself) written with stylistic idiosyncrasies that make the book different without being weird. Things change abruptly for the author when "current events" intrude and his wife's troubled pregnancy (which he decides to incorporate into his writing of the past) makes him look at his own misgivings and fears. This intertwining of remembering the past while facing up to things as they happen gives the book a powerful denouement no reader is likely to forget.