Many nights that autumn I went to a bar where the floor was covered with peanut shells, and I drank, and I read James Agee. Liquor carried his trauma all through me, twisted me pliable to the loss, and I wasn’t afraid to think like this— pliable to the loss—because I was drunk, and drunk meant sentiment was not only permissible but imperative.

Turns out Let Us Now Praise Famous Men wasn’t about famous men. It was about bedbugs and mildewed bridal caps and farmhouses like cracked nipples on the land, about a woman Agee might have fucked but didn’t. Also, it was about guilt. Mainly it was about guilt.

Originally, it was a magazine article gone rogue. In 1936, Fortune told Agee to write a piece about sharecroppers in the Deep South, and he gave them a spiritual dark night of the soul instead. They rejected it, and he wrote another four hundred pages. It’s a hard book to classify: it’s got sections that don’t seem to belong together: discussions of cotton prices and denim overalls and the soul as an angel nailed to a cross: it uses colons somewhat like this sentence does: rabidly. It’s so long-winded and beautiful you want to shake it by the bones of its gorgeous shoulders and make it stop. But the difficulty of closure is one of its obsessions: the endlessness of labor and hunger. It’s trying to tell a story that won’t end.

I was trying, at the time I read it, to tell a story of my own. I’d recently returned to America after living in Nicaragua, where I’d been robbed and punched in the face one night, drunk. My nose had been broken, then partly fixed by an expensive surgeon in Los Angeles. I’d moved to New Haven, where it seemed like someone was always getting mugged, and I was afraid to walk alone in the dark. “Nearly all is cruelly stained,” Agee wrote, “in the tensions of physical need.” There’s a notion we absorb about suffering—that it should expand us, render us porous—but this didn’t happen to me. I felt shrunk. Damage became fear. It became an insistence.

So I read Agee thinking about his own guilt when he was supposed to be thinking about three Alabama families, and I thought about myself when I was supposed to be thinking about Agee. I loved...