Zoë Kravitz just wanted to make her mother laugh. She needed to get her attention first, though. They were at home in Topanga, California, and her mom was surrounded by her closest friends. The group was tending to her in a way that Kravitz, just nine years old at the time, could not. The funeral for Kravitz’s grandmother—her mother’s mother—had taken place only hours earlier, and everyone had gathered at the house after, wanting to help. Help host. Help clean. Be there.

Kravitz didn’t yet fully understand mortality. But she felt her mother’s sorrow and was desperate to alleviate it. So Kravitz snuck off to her bedroom. She put on her little pinstripe-suit costume and added a fake mustache, too. Then she grabbed a CD, popped it in the player, and turned up the volume on Brandy and Monica’s R&B heater, “The Boy Is Mine.” In front of everyone but laser focused on the reaction of just one, Kravitz broke out into a lip-synced routine.

The crowd laughed, including her mom. But what Kravitz said afterward left her mother short of breath. “Mama, don’t be sad,” she cooed. “F

Kravitz is telling me the story as an aside, twenty-five years later. It’s our second time meeting, and she’s just revealed the greatest source of anxiety in her life. It’s not the big, universal questions—How long until global warming burns us all to a crisp?—that fill her with dread. It’s the inevitabilities: the future loss of her own parents, for instance. Half a bottle of orange wine sits between us. The BLT she ordered—a large part of the reason we walked across Lower Manhattan from Washington Square Park down here to Dimes in Chinatown on a sweltering June afternoon, I gather—is nearly gone.

or all we know, death is fun.”