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he bought me a stick, he said with a laugh, “Because, Bambina, you’ll drive all the boys wild. I bet half of them won’t know how to drive your car.” He was right, except Blake knew how to drive a stick.
    When I arrived in Los Angeles a week after my high school graduation, Blake and I would race his friends—the sons of directors, movie stars, and studio moguls—across Mulholland Drive. One of his best friends, the son of an executive at Viacom, flipped his BMW in one of the canyons. He was lucky to have walked away alive. But a few weeks later, he showed up at a party in Bel Air with a brand-new GMC Denali: black rims, blacked-out lights, and tinted windows. High-end cars for the kids who come from “real money” were disposable.
    During my summer at the New York Film Academy, I met Steven Spielberg’s son, who was a friend of Blake’s. He took me to DreamWorks Studios for lunch one day. We ate salmon and Caesar salad and played Grand Theft Auto the entire afternoon in Mr. Spielberg’s office. When I got up to use the bathroom and came back, Mr. Spielberg was standing in front of his desk. He looked at me, smiled, and introduced himself. I wiped my hands along my red Marc Jacobs skirt and then shook his hand. He asked where I was from and where I was planning on going to college. I couldn’t believe how normal he was. I wanted him to be the vicious director yelling at me through an old-fashioned megaphone. But he was just like any other dad, which thoroughly disappointed me. He had hundreds of awards that followed the entire length of his office. I was oblivious to his being considered the greatest film director of our time. Jaws made me nauseous, and E.T. scared me so much that I refused to even walk into the family room when Mara or Chloe was watching it. But I wanted to touch one of his awards . So when he wasn’t looking, I picked up his Golden Globe for Saving Private Ryan .
    After we finished playing video games, Mr. Spielberg took us for a cruise around the lot in his golf cart. My father was so excited on the other line of the phone when I called him that night and told him about my afternoon. “My little movie star!” he exclaimed. “By golly, Steven Spielberg . . .” I beamed, knowing how much I’d impressed him. I’d been in Hollywood only three weeks and was hanging out in Mr. Spielberg’s office.
    I was never conscious of the kind of privilege I was around or the fact that I got whatever I wanted. I was growing and being shaped inside a bubble of wealth where everyone I surrounded myself with appeared to accept it as normal. Normal. I believed it was normal. Because it was. It was all that I knew.

-3-
The Trial
    Six months had passed since the FBI arrested my father, and it was now summer. Mara, Chloe, my mother, and I were piled into the Range Rover and heading to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Battery Park, where we would stay for the duration of the trial. My father had flown up a few weeks earlier to prep with his attorneys, spending sleepless nights reviewing documents and depositions in the hotel conference room. We drove to save money, and when Mara questioned him before we left about why we were staying at such an expensive hotel, he replied, “Because we got a good deal. Not a lot of tourists want to stay downtown right now.”
    The financial district was desolate and abandoned as we made our way down Greenwich Street, passing the metal fence encompassing what remained of the World Trade Center. I saw enormous tractor-trailers bulldozing and digging up dirt and construction workers yelling at one another back and forth in their orange hard hats and yellow vests. I thought about loss as I remembered sitting in religion class when the principal called for an emergency school meeting, watching on television the collapse of the second tower into the crescendo of death, and the rumbling of F-16s over my bed that