My own rare diary entries from the summer of 2008, when I was 23, make me sound like an overwhelmed executive assistant to my own memory. “S. and G. had their first child yesterday, the first of my friends to do such a thing,” I wrote in one. “Well. Now seems the time to put that to the side. There will be plenty of time for considering it later.” Elsewhere I favored embarrassing hyperbole, as when I claimed that same week that the rapper Nas “saved my life.”