Curiously, this question often comes couched in a hypothetical — How would you respond to the charge that your book is autobiographical? Charge? Am I being charged, right at this very moment? I feel like ducking behind the lectern, or slinking toward a seat, or pretending to notice some kind bookstore employee telling me my time is up.

You’d think, since this is the only question that dependably arises, that I would by now have come up with a reliable, formidable answer, which I could trot out at each event, speaking slowly but confidently, with pauses and bursts of fluency meant to simulate live thought. Nope. Each time, I stammer and stop and start over and hold my mouth open (a very real demonstration of live thought, unfortunately).

But now, at the comfort of my own desk, watched only by my new puppy (who would love to chew my keyboard, if only I’d look away for a minute), I hope I can do slightly better. So, how would I respond to the charge of having written an autobiographical novel?

Guilty! But also not guilty! See, the characters who populate the novel, as well as the things they say and do, are all happily invented. Henry exists nowhere but in the book’s pages, and same goes for Margaret, Sameer, David, Lucy, and all the rest of them — I had a lot of work for them to do, and fortunately or un-, that didn’t leave room for impersonations of family and friends.

The canvas on which they all were painted, however, is a good deal more familiar. I did, as described in an earlier post, once work as a keeper at the Central Park Zoo. I did grow up in Chevy Chase and then move to New York, just as my book’s protagonist, Henry, does. I too have an older brother and grew up in a yellow house at the bottom of a hill and went to an elementary school called Somerset. And many other particulars besides.

And yet I believe, in spite of the knowing smile now passing over the face of my pup, that all of those things are essentially incidental, like the fact of the book’s having been written in English. I wrote it in English because that happened to be the language I grew up speaking, but I think it could just as well have been written in Italian or Russian or Inuit. The substance of a novel is a jelly-ish thing that isn’t contained in its language, and similarly isn’t, I don’t think, contained in the biographical details of its characters.

I can imagine a Russian author writing a version of my book about a young man growing up in a small town outside of St. Petersburg and going to work cleaning up after the circus in Moscow. The particulars would all be different, the faces and names and settings would all be shuffled, but some essential thing — the way of looking at things, the manner of interacting with the world — would remain. The book would be Zoology’s long-lost identical twin. Zoology and it would sit across the table from each other, unable to speak but amazed at how they both take off their glasses when nervous and prefer peanut M&M’s to regular.

Its author would stand stumped at many a distant podium.

I’d spent a lot of time in zoos growing up (my mom worked designing exhibits for the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. and had always adored animals, so I had quite fond associations with the zoo. But also I wanted a job, strange as it sounds, that I knew wouldn’t lead to a job offer once college was over. I was already certain that I wanted to write fiction for a living, and I didn’t want to get involved in anything that might distract me from that.

The Central Park Zoo (which I’d visited and loved) seemed like just the thing.

And they really weren’t kidding about the work not being glamorous. I’d worked before — at a bookstore, as a research assistant in a biology lab, at a political magazine — but I’d never done steady work that was so physical. I know that the huge majority of the world’s jobs are like this, so it really shouldn’t have come as such a surprise, but I’d never experienced anything like it before.

Someone would hand me a rake and point to the long dirt-covered area where the goats lived — and that would be my afternoon’s work. Or else I’d spend a couple of hours scrubbing out the cages where the guinea fowl were going to lay their eggs. It gave me plenty of time to daydream and to stare at the animals and to think about the things I was writing.

I wrote on index cards that I kept in my pocket, so I could tuck them away if my boss happened to wander near. One afternoon I was leaning on the goat pen, writing an idea — probably a very lofty idea for a novel that had nothing to do with the zoo — when Newman the Goat, a central character in my book who really does exist, appeared over my shoulder and bit the cards out of my hand. He seemed to be making fun of me, reminding me that there was plenty of material right in front of me. And that I had forgotten to feed him his afternoon meal.

The next year in college, my last year, I started writing what would become Zoology, though I didn’t have any real idea of its shape at first. I had just found something about the animals so endlessly interesting — the way they carried on being themselves, day after day, in such limited circumstances — that I knew I wanted to do something with them.

After graduating, I took a job as a tutor for a company in Manhattan. I was able to set my own schedule, which gave me the time to keep working on my book, and it also meant I got to go into lots of families’ apartments and see how they live, which is something I love to do.

I’ve worked with everyone from eight-year-olds to eighteen-year-olds, so — aside from relearning the quadratic equation and the dates of the French Revolution — I’ve also gotten to re-experience, in a strange way, huge stretches of life that I’d forgotten. I remember now the amazing conscience-less-ness with which little kids eat (whole plates of mini-pizzas, pints of ice cream, bags of Cheetos), the daily painfulness of being twelve, the brilliance and industry with which high schoolers guard their social lives from their parents.

But I’ve been tutoring now for about two and a half years, and this spring, when the book comes out, I think I’m finally going to stop. I can already feel the formula for a parabola sinking back to the dark trenches of my mind, probably not to be dislodged until, years from now, some future son or daughter comes crankily home with a math test.