"In both of my pink bibles, I hunted for knowledge, for evidence, for legitimacy. Would I have reached for that baby pink illustrated children’s bible if it had been a brown book of coarse pages?"
"I looked for stories that felt close enough to claim as mine, yet distant enough to claim as “fiction.” My grandparents, Guka in particular, served as entry into a world I didn’t feel I had access to—a world of painfully real people with proper, lived lives."
"There’s this photograph of my dad, from the late 1990s, in an old album somewhere on a bookshelf. He is standing on a rock, laughing. His hair is wavy, and he’s tan. The ocean is behind him. "