“I believed the horror movie was the start of how I oriented my time, the primacy of the images that were not my life. Now I know it began with the photos of Polly, inescapable in 1993.”

At the table with James Salter.“To revisit the past was like constantly crossing some Bergschrund,” James Salter writes in the introduction to his 1997 memoir, “a deep chasm between what my life had been before I changed it completely and what it…