“It is the weekend Beyoncé releases her “Formation” single and a bad queen has just performed it without breaking a sweat. I am watching the queen and learning that the way not to sweat is to move so little that every move seems like drama. I’ve got the not moving part down, which is how I am here at a club with a roommate whose friends want to meet the Black girl she let live in her house.”

On specific language, families, mispronunciations, and revisiting Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake.”

“I was unstable and grieving and more suited for a patient friendship than the dramas of new love. But I loved her and in thirst, I acted unlovingly by climbing into a lap in which I wasn’t welcome. My behavior is the definition of obscene.”

“Every day since my father died has been at least a little fucked up. There is no such thing as a non-fucked up day when you are a Daddy’s girl without a father.”

I don’t know you. I never did. But I presume that in all of our family, perhaps, I am the only one who could even begin to understand you.

“Loving women and loving the land are the two things I told myself I would never do, and somehow, they got all tangled up in each other.”