Author Sorayya Khan on what it means to grow up between two cultures, and on mothering and being mothered in a global world.
memoir
Families Like Ours: A Reading List for the Children of Queer Parents
Some of us got to stay with our moms or dads. Others did not.
The Gradual Extinction of Softness
“The memory of hunger is a curse that never leaves you.”
Cresting the Wave
“A surfer comes to grips with a dark family secret born from the swells near Bob Hall Pier.”
John Updike, His Stories, and Me
“But now I’ve been a writer for 30 years, I can understand the impulses that I and he and probably every other writer have: to go after a subject we’re compelled by.”
Grace: An Unfinished Draft, A Fire
“In Texas—Georgia—in Alabama—all over this vast canvas of fear that we call America, women will die. They won’t have time to run away. They will be great-Aunts only in name, and in death. And their deaths will disappear into a language made and remade by men to cover their shitty sins.”
Searching for a Lost Odessa — and a Deaf Childhood
“When I turn the hearing aids on in these streets, my parents are dead again. So, I turn them off.”
The Night Gary Drove Me Home
“It is not a normal thing to do—to acknowledge to yourself that you may have slept with a serial killer.”
Loving Molly, and Mourning Her: A Husband’s Extraordinary Essay
Blake Butler writes movingly about his late wife, poet Molly Brodak.