“The horizontal, chosen family works outside of the law — in The Gilda Stories, love is never codified by a wedding, same sex and interracial relationships play out beyond the reach of history, and one can have limitless mothers.”
“Displays of public indecency jolted me more than I’d like to admit. Living in the city this summer, I felt I was experiencing patriarchy as I had as a little girl—as something new.”
“Unlike the classic chicken breast, however, the cuy goes from farmhouse to fridge to spit to butcher block to plate in a way that is probably more humane, yet also more graphic, and thus more disturbing. Guinea pigs are cute; cuy, as it turns out, is tasty.”
The lemon was precious, as was every morsel of food that entered one’s house. I was raised to shudder at the mere thought of throwing away anything on my plate, encouraged to catch all the stray grains of kasha and watching my dad soak up every last bit of soup in his plate with the bread my mum baked like clockwork every few days.
