He loved records. When given an elementary school assignment to “write about something we had at home,” he reeled off from memory the precise selections, composers, singers and dates of each band on an opera anthology ranging from 1909 to 1932. He also loved relics of bygone time, ingested horehound drops as snack food and was using the world “talkie” about movies in 1965.

Among Mr. Page’s extremely colorful examples of his obsessive, controlling boyhood behavior is his having gotten hold of  and then re-edited, following a scene-by-scene description of the original from a library book  an eight-millimeter print of the 12-minute silent film “The Great Train Robbery” because he knew that a distributor had tampered with the original. And there’s more: in 1967 he was directing his own films and became the subject of a prizewinning documentary called “A Day With Timmy Page.” Mr. Page’s wing-nut film fanaticism led him to discover Bob Dylan’s “Bringing It All Back Home” not for the obvious reasons but because Louella Parsons’s biography of Jean Harlow appears amid the coffee-table clutter on the album’s cover.

With seemingly effortless grace this book moves back and forth between Mr. Page’s very private idiosyncrasies and those of the wider culture in which he came of age. The fear and rigid conventionality of the 1950s were relatively easy for him. The ’60s took more effort, but he worked hard to adapt. He was sufficiently well assimilated to go with the flow, grow long hair and get a job in a record store, “where I became the very model of the snide know-it-all counterperson we have all met and loathed.”

“Parallel Play” is illustrated by a series of expertly chosen photos of the author that amount to a kind of time-lapse photography: from a little boy making an open-mouthed goldfish grimace (“Try as I might, I couldn’t remember how to smile”) to a beret-wearing, contented-looking, broadly smiling professor. He is on a park bench in Baltimore. Thanks to the candid, companionable voice of his memoir, the implied invitation to sit down and discuss, oh, maybe the later Beach Boys records (which he marvelously describes as “vaporous, ethereal, elaborately ornamented musical clockworks, distinguished by a blossoming tenderness and sheer sonic splendor”) is all but irresistible.

But there is also a strain of mournfulness running through this book. It’s not about Asperger’s, but it is intensified by the peculiar nature of Mr. Page’s Asperger-governed perceptions. Tirelessly logical, sometimes agonizingly so, he lives life in an extra dimension, with a sense of time that irrevocably links past and present, living and dead, ardent love affairs and broken ones.

The people who left him  and it seems to have happened a lot  are still with him. The schoolmate who died in his teens has become, in Mr. Page’s imagination, his aging contemporary. The music heard at a long-ago party is still playing. And the hardest job of Mr. Page’s life, as “Parallel Play” conveys even in its brightest moments, has been to struggle for a way to make peace with it all.