But, as is frequently the case, our parents deserve more credit than we give them. “I’ve probably known since you were 5 years old,” she told him. “I’ve just been waiting for you to come out for years.”
After that, their relationship changed. “She’s much more chill and open to the decisions I make,” Gaw says. “Moments like that, after I came out, really helped me push forward. I think I was scared to share because I was afraid of people judging me.”
Gaw needed that confidence to pursue the huge leap he took in October 2020, when he quit a lucrative career as a UX designer to follow his passion: writing a very personal cookbook about growing up Taiwanese American, straddling two cultures, losing his dad, being gay. And of course, food is the through-line he follows, his grandmas’ recipes for Taiwanese home cooking tempered with the Cracker Barrels and Chipotles of his suburban upbringing.
Close your eyes and, for a moment, imagine you know two languages. For any noun you can think of—object, feeling, place—two words exist where a monolingual brain comes up with only one. When speaking, reading, or writing, your brain must decide which of those words to use—an added task on top of the language processing you’re already doing.
Scientists suspect that sorting through those extra words—and switching between them—gives bilingual people more practice with cognitive control. But whether bilingual brains are neurologically different from monolingual ones is still unknown.
The Passenger flirts with not being a traditional novel and succeeds. Stella Maris doesn't care about not being a novel, and it shines because of it. The former is dark and mysterious like a night out on the bayou. The latter — a spiritual sister presented as a coda to be published a month later — is wild, profoundly sinister, and more a philosophical exploration and celebration of math-mysticism and the possibilities — and perhaps unknowability? — of quantum mechanics than a novel. Taken together, these two novels are a floating signifier that refuses to be pinned down. They are also great additions to McCarthy's already outstanding oeuvre and proof that the mind of one of our greatest living writers is as sharp as it has ever been.
“The Singularities,” Banville’s exhilarating new novel, offers itself quite overtly as a rumination on, or rummage around, ideas about representation. Like much of his best work, it aims to both scrutinize and confront one of the central challenges of the human endeavor: how to create an accurate portrait of things.
It’s hard to imagine a future in which the myth of the American West isn’t dominated by white men. It’s harder yet to imagine a moment when dismantling it is more important than it is today, as a kind of manifest destiny drives everything from pipeline permits to SpaceX moon flights. Even revisionist westerns that puncture the romance of settler colonialism (“Meek’s Cutoff,” “The Power of the Dog”) sideline Mexicans (the first cowboys), African Americans (who also rode West on wagon trains) and, most confoundingly, Native Americans.
Katie Hickman’s riveting new history, “Brave Hearted: The Women of the American West,” works to correct this imbalance by foregrounding the historical experiences of Western women — Black, white, Mexican, indigenous, mixed race and Chinese. It covers the period from 1836, when Presbyterian missionaries Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spaulding, the first “westering” women, set out with their husbands for Oregon country, to 1890, when the U.S. Census Bureau pronounced the frontier closed.