Justin Torres and I met almost twenty years ago in late-stage Riot Grrrl San Francisco, draped here and there over dirty couches and mattresses on the floors of Castro apartments with a dozen punks trying to make rent. I was a housecleaner and Justin was a sometimes rent boy. Somehow and somewhere, we were both writing. We were just on the other side of the veil between ourselves and “what had happened to us”; we were at the very beginning of composing stories about ourselves, of our own making. When Justin wrote the story that was eventually to become the first chapter of his novel, We the Animals, all us Lost Boys marveled at this incredible golden egg that had dropped out of him. As it happens, that story and the legs and arms and wings it grew brought fellowships and residencies and heavyweight mentors and, finally, a book.

We the Animals is a book like no other. It roils through the underwater blood-currents of a family, bearing unflinching witness to their love and violence. Justin offers us a translation of that family’s survival and destruction, a brief, concentrated passage of their mythology so potent and incisive that it cleanly slices the reader open head to tail.

At a slender 120 pages, the novel was translated into at least a dozen languages in its first printing, and has been wildly celebrated and life-changing not only for those who read it, but also for its author. When the book was adapted into a film, Justin invited me to design the costumes. I’d never worked on a movie before, and neither had he. But I quit my job, and he took the summer off to consult on the film full-time. We sweated and chain-smoked our way through a humid upstate New York summer and watched his stories become forensically re-created by the devoted Jeremiah Zagar, our director. In Utica, we spent all our waking hours piggybacking the actor who played someone resembling Justin’s boyhood self, changing his underpants and shoes, wrestling with his brothers, and crying from exhaustion when reassembling this former life became back-breaking labor, or strayed too far away from, or toward, the real experiences that informed the novel.

As ragamuffin, queer punks raised in poverty, neither of us had ever imagined that we would grow up to be salarymen—I’m a creative director and Justin is a professor—with health insurance and car payments. In the midst of wrestling with these strange new costumes, we both dropped out for a summer to be herded around in passenger vans and negotiate by walkie-talkie about what color pajamas his mother wore in 1985. But there we...