In ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’, Derrida writes: ‘And in these moments of nakedness, under the gaze of the animal, everything can happen to me, I am like a child ready for the apocalypse, I am (following) the apocalypse itself, that is to say the ultimate and first event of the end, the unveiling and the verdict.’ In his encounter with otherness, under the gaze of the animal, Derrida evokes a child's bewilderment, in which all is open to change, from apocalypse to sudden revelation. Upturning the stable bounds of selfhood and ethics, the animal returns him to the immediacy of childhood perception, restoring the world from convention to wonder and precarity. Such moments of encounter inform my final chapters, exploring how coming-of-age or Bildungsroman (novel of formation) is predicated upon the individual's opening onto a creaturely whole, in which, as across children's stories and imaginaries, the land is animated in holistic union, and animals and plants treated as partners in an often overwhelming world. Returning to the 1960s and 1970s, such encounters and comings-of-age are framed by seismic transformations, as cities are rocked by earthquakes, drought and mass migration, and delimited by the ominous spectre of the Jamahiriyya. As throughout my analyses, sudden rupture with the past is a defining framework, as the transitional period of childhood, in all its openness to apocalypse and sudden revelation, coincides with what Pierre Nora describes as the ‘increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past that is gone for good’, in a period when ‘anything and everything may disappear’. In addition to childhood memory, I therefore explore the memories and tales passed on by older relatives, as the ‘difficulty of story’ emerges through both the unsettling of Bildungsroman, opened onto creaturely being through moments of ‘encounter’, and the backward-looking impulse of ‘too-long-tales’, threatened by forgetfulness.