It’s the summer of 1966, and Sheila and Peter are a young married couple living in Berkeley. They are very much in love, and also very high—tripping on acid for the first time in their lives, in Tilden Park

It would be easy to summarize ‘Being Lolita’ as a memoir about a toxic, exploitative relationship between a high school English teacher and his student, and it is about that—but it’s about that in the way Walden is about a pond.

If we bring rigorous, unflinching attention to acts of unthinkable cruelty, to our rage and our betrayals—we can find difficult and important truths lurking inside sensational stories: truths about trauma and its afterlife, varieties of claustrophobia, and the dark alchemies by which sadness or longing turn to anger.

Leslie Jamison speaks with Amy Irvine about the myths of Western masculinity, the sublimity of endangered territory, and the kinds of intimacy enabled by the wilderness.