Jane Schoenbrun’s Love Letter to Teen Horror

“It’s not like years ago,” croons Michael Stipe on R.E.M.’s “Nightswimming,” the spare, piano-driven ballad that brings the band’s 1992 album, Automatic for the People, to a melancholy crescendo. The song’s crystalline reminiscence of teenage horseplay is uncommonly personal and precise, like Proust by way of Don McLean. “They cannot see me naked,” the narrator sighs coyly, treading water between innocence and experience.