When Griffin Hurt was in ninth grade, he was a child actor, starring in a hit TV series and winning a crucial role in an esteemed director’s latest film. But that wasn’t all. Griffin fell into an affair with a 36-year-old mother of two and he was also being sexually abused by his private school’s wrestling coach. And yet, as Griffin writes of these events in the first paragraph of his novel, “It didn’t seem strange at the time.” Calling it his novel is a bit of authorial trickery: Griffin Hurt doesn’t exist. He’s the narrator of Adam Ross’ “Playworld,” a coming-of-age tale set largely in Manhattan in 1980-81. Ross’ acclaimed first novel, “Mr. Peanut” was often described as a meta-textual Mobius strip of a procedural about a possible murder. “Playworld,’ by contrast, is fully grounded in the day-to-day. It’s an expansive novel but one that captures that time and era in gritty and vibrant detail, a story filled with both hurt and humor.  SEE ALSO: Like books? Get our free Book Pages newsletter about bestsellers, authors and more It’s also filled with autobiographical detail, though as Ross likes to say, it “rhymes with my life,” meaning he has reworked kernels of his own experience. But the differences are notable: he had a shorter acting career, although he was one of two finalists for a role in “On Golden Pond,” which might have changed his life if he’d landed it; and in terms of an abusive coach in his life, he worked with a watchdog group to get the man banned. Like Ross, Griffin also lost a childhood apartment to a fire; in the aftermath of that trauma, Ross notes, Griffin begins “masking, creating space between his own face and his emotion. That masking helps Griffin as an actor but hurts his ability to communicate his emotions, his wants and fears. In “Playworld” too many adults in Griffin’s life take that era’s popular notion that kids are people too as an excuse to be careless with these Gen X teens instead of providing parenting or guidance.   “We had so much freedom,” said Ross. “But my brother likes to say we were raised by wolves.”  This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  Q. First novels are often autobiographical coming-of-age tales. Yours was a wildly ambitious, experimental saga. Then after a book of short stories you wrote “Playworld.” Why do it in that order? I’ve been thinking about this subject matter since 1999 but to tap those aspects of my childhood, I wanted to be at the top of my game and have as much distance as possible. So I didn’t feel ready to tackle it nor did I have a clear idea of the scope or the specifics of the subject matter and dramatic arc.  This book took so long because you’re inventing things and bending your experience to make that character different from you, to arrive at something decoupled from autobiography. One small example: Like Griffin, I did a show at Studio 8H, where “Saturday Night Live” was shot. But I didn’t have this boiling resentment Griffin has about spending his summer there. If I were writing a memoir I’d talk about how the NBC commissary was awesome and about taking friends up to see bands or the SNL cast rehearse. Q. Griffin’s emotional growth is often endangered by adults’ laissez-faire attitude or is actively undercut by their behavior. How much of that is specific to that time and place? That’s a big subject of the novel. Gen X kids are resilient and tough but we also nearly got killed 700 times. So there are scars. There’s a political dimension to this too, that the book talks about vis-a-vis the Reagan era. There was this monumental shift in tax policy in this country, and deregulation: the idea of less government is better. Well, we had less parenting, we had deregulated parenting. It’s like [the single mother] Naomi and [wrestling coach] Kepplemen embody the 1980s: get mine now, take a loan on future generations that you’re not going to repay and that will cost them. Naomi gives him a desperately needed kind of maternal attention and Kepplemen teaches him important things for wrestling and life about constantly moving and not getting stuck. But these are predators. They damage him, they hurt him.  Q. Kepplemen is eventually banished and Naomi vanishes for a large chunk of the book. Was it important for you to give Griffin a chance to be on his own and have normal teenage experiences and make normal teenage mistakes? Absolutely, yes. Griffin is almost allowed to be a kid and that changes the whole tone. In Griffin’s Morning in America, he imagines walking down the beach with this girl Amanda, holding hands and listening to cheesy songs. But, of course, that doesn’t happen. Q. Griffin tells Naomi he’s going to be a writer and she asks if he’s going to spill his secrets. It’s a meta moment for a writer spilling his secrets. Were you wary about the audience focusing on the distance between you and Griffin? As the writer of “Mr. Peanut,” I welcome a meta-textual element, I’m open about the autobiographical elements. I also love that moment because there’s a vindictive element, where Griffin is hitting back at Naomi but also he’s salvaging/redeeming all of this terrible stuff through art. So this is the moment where Griffin states explicitly, “You’re reading my book” and that’s an important distinction.  Q. How do you balance Griffin in the moment and Griffin looking back? It took me at least a year to get that narrative strategy under control. It’s like being in an aquarium. The narrator from the future will take you right up to the glass and an orca will swim up but we can pull back. But I wanted the reader to experience the more terrible or hilarious events in the present for Griffin, so up close you have a visceral response.  Q. There are a couple of phenomenal set pieces, one being when Griffin and his friends stumble upon a guy standing on a rock in Central Park, who explains the meaning of life while telling his own story, which only Griffin’s brother claims to understand. Can you talk about that? What I’m trying to capture is how there were certain things we saw when we were alone with other kids that were so freaking beautiful and strange. Did you figure out who the guy was? Listen, dude, nobody does. It is one of the biggest Easter eggs in the book. The reader should at least suspect it’s someone who impacts everyone in the book later on.  To me, that’s what a big novel can do. It can say, “We’re going to be here for a while, so I’m going to go in this direction.” But yes, there’s also a meta-textual level where the prose goes on afterburners and is stylistically different. I think that’s Griffin, the writer. Q. Another set piece is Griffin’s dad telling the story of his first true love. That’s, again, Future Griffin. He’s trying to fully flesh out everyone as this writer was trying to – I’m trying to get beyond binary thinking about people. So in the beginning, Elliot, the therapist, doesn’t get Griffin at all or isn’t even interested in Griffin but by the end, they’re having really foundational conversations.  With his father, Griffin takes this story and gives it extraordinary momentum and tragic pathos. It also serves as a kind of backstory for his father that shows you why he’s the person he is without forgiving his toxic masculinity. Griffin is a reliable reporter but he gets poetic license with these stories. It’s “Playworld.” It’s about actors, people taking center stage and saying, “Let me tell you a story.” Related Articles Books | Writer Octavia Butler imagined an LA ravaged by fires. Her Altadena cemetery survived Books | How Robert Crais drags Elvis Cole and Joe Pike into the darkness in ‘The Big Empty’ Books | Abigail Thomas shows the strength of honesty and vulnerability in ‘Still Life at Eighty’ Books | Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Inglewood-born author of ‘Farewell to Manzanar,’ dies at 90 Books | The Book Pages: When the community is under fire, people respond