IT is occasionally true that the spark that ignites one’s grand, all-consuming work is struck early in life — even by happenstance.

Niobe Way was a teenager when her younger brother Lucan had a terrible falling out with his best friend. John lived just across the street; the two boys were inseparable. One day her mother caught the boys cutting up a treasured childhood rag doll. She read both of them the riot act and then some. John slunk off.

Seven, eight times after, Lucan would knock on John’s door. But he would always be told that John was not home or did not want to see him. The boys’ rupture shook Lucan deeply. Even as a happily married adult, he does not like to talk about, as Dr. Way recounts, “the boy who broke his heart.”

Recently, Dr. Way, now 47 and a professor at New York University, where she is an expert in developmental adolescent psychology focusing on male friendships, reflected on her brother’s experience those many years ago: “That’s when I first saw the significance of friendships for boys, in both my brother’s love and his sense of loss.”