Growing up in 1970s Manhattan, in an apartment where such luminaries as Saul Bellow and Andy Warhol came over for raucous parties, Ariel Leve was often alone in her room at night. Yelling out for the grown-ups to be quiet and let her sleep, she lived at the whim of her narcissistic, volatile mother. “I had no choice but to exist in the sea that she swam in. It was a fragile ecosystem where the temperature changed without warning. My natural shape was dissolved and I became shapeless.” Leve’s story, recounted in her acclaimed memoir, An Abbreviated Life, is a heartbreaking portrait of how vulnerable we are, especially as children, to the force of others’ turmoil...