Yesterday was the birthday of Patrick Modiano (b. 1945), the fifteenth French author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (2014). He’s written more than 40 novels—most of them around 150 pages or fewer—and writes hauntingly about the mysteries of memory, self, loss, and World War II.

Modiano was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France (suburban Paris), less than a year after Paris was freed from Nazi occupation in World War II. His father was Jewish-Italian, his mother was Flemish; his father had spent WWII engaged in shady, black market deals with people involved with the Gestapo, and he continued this sort of shady dealing throughout his life. His parents split shortly after the war. Both parents were miserable at parenting and seemed to have little interest in their children. His mother sent Modiano and his younger brother to live with a friend when Modiano was just six, an arrangement that ended when the friend was arrested—so, still more shadowy associations. (Modiano drew on this experience heavily in his novel So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood, 2016.) Modiano’s brother died at nine and Modiano spent most of his childhood in boarding schools, finally running away at the age of 14.

Modiano has spent much of his writing career exploring lost, distorted, or buried memory, digging to uncover truths—both on a national level (questioning France’s fuzzy memory regarding wartime complicity) and on a personal level. His novel Missing Person (1978), for example, is about a private detective who can’t remember most of his own past and decides to investigate his own life. His 1997 nonfiction work, Dora Bruder, describes Modiano’s search for a real missing person: a Jewish teenager who in 1941 ran away from the Catholic boarding school that was hiding her. Dora was missing for four months before returning home; shortly after, she was sent to Auschwitz, as her parents had been. Both books are now available in English: more and more of Modiano’s books have been translated to English since he won the Nobel Prize.

Modiano has been married to Dominique Zehrfuss since 1970. They have two daughters and I would bet money that they live in Paris, because Modiano is all about walking the streets of Paris.

Have a fine and changeable Tuesday, buffeted by the winds of fortune and the mighty Atlantic, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.