I met her on a Tuesday, at the laundromat on my block in the East Village. We were pulling clean clothes from opposite dryers, and she was wearing a fantastic amaretto suede skirt. She was tall, slender, and fresh-faced—an utter gamine—and looked like she wouldn’t take a compliment amiss, so I praised the skirt, and she grinned, thanked me, then unleashed a torrent of cheery, animated talk, telling me she had just graduated from Vassar and moved to the neighborhood. She was writing a play, assistant-directing a show at an experimental theater nearby, and was also working for a young woman playwright, whom she named.

I was a writer and sometime theater critic, I explained, and had reviewed the first New York show of the playwright she was working for. Pleased by the coincidences, we exchanged names and kept talking. I had the rapturous, vertiginous sensation of having fallen back in time, into a conversation in the 1980's with my high school best friend. That was crazy because that friend and I were the same age; whereas Nadja had just turned 22, she told me, and I was 48— more than old enough to be her mother. Doing the math, I realized Nadja hadn’t even been born in the 1980's.

Since the aughts, I have shared a summerhouse on Fire Island with young writers and editors, mostly millennials, whose enthusiasm for pretty much everything—except irony—fascinates me. But Nadja was a decade younger than any of them. She was practically Generation Z—like my niece and nephews, who aren’t even twelve.