This content is available to subscribers and issue purchasers.
My grandfather must have tried, in his limited way, to know me. He had a lot of grandkids, a crowd that he shuffled through in a silent, private bubble made from poor hearing and patriarchy. After the cursory hello kiss—whiskery cheek, the smell of Werther’s Originals—we kids ignored him. But me, at eight, at eleven, I was singled out. My grandfather sometimes talked to me. This was uncommon enough that my aunts would watch side-eyed as he waved me upstairs to his room, to show me and my mother the books he’d been reading. My grandfather’s books were dismal, by