I have a friend, a single man in his late forties, who still broods over the love he didn’t get—still doesn’t get—from his emotionally inaccessible parents. They are the cause of all his suffering, he believes, the cause of his failed relationships. Even as I nod compassionately over our herbal tea, I want to shake...

I was a budding genealogist when I entered college in my thirties to earn an undergraduate degree. When my history professor gave the class an assignment to write a research paper, I told her I wanted to write about my great-grandparents, who immigrated through Ellis Island in the early 1900s. “That’s fine,” she said, “but...