A Complicated Inheritance: How My Homophobic Grandmother Taught Me to Write About My Queerness
The tower of books beside my bed became so unwieldy, so cattywampus in its leanings, that the other night it finally toppled. Its crash was muffled against dirty laundry and a cast aside pillow, but when I woke, its settled and still existence was severe nonetheless. Rather than piling them back on my nightstand, I brought armfuls to the living room bookcases, shoving them into the shelves at strange angles, stuffing them in too-tight crevices, and when no more could fit, I scanned for a few titles to cull. A worn black spine caught my eye. The book was a 1963 edition of Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, with a suspicious brown stain creeping across the italic title. I’d never read it, and yet holding the paperback flooded me with a potent blend of nostalgia and shame.
When I graduated from high school, my grandmother gifted me a stack of boxes as tall as I was. She’d packaged them for the winding drive from Vermont to Maine as if they were Jenga blocks, wedged into the corner of a long cardboard lid. For years, she’d carefully collected them from thrift stores and library sales, all used copies with shabby torn covers and earmarked pages. They were her favorites from when she was my age. Travels with Charley was among them. Soft and round in a quilted vest she’d made and velvety old jeans flecked with paint, she pushed oversized glasses up the bridge of her proud nose while she waited for my reaction. Fingers swept through black hair, revealing a magical fish-belly flash of silver on the underside of her bangs as ice cubes jangled in her omnipresent glass of Coca-Cola. I gave her a half-hearted sideways hug and scrunched my face into a fake smile, unsure what to do with this towering stack of classics—Proust, Yeats, T.S. Eliot—then ambled to the yard to hang out with my friends.
She was assuredly disappointed by my lukewarm reception, but I was off kilter. My parents’ marriage had just imploded after a string of emotional and physical infidelities. Just as I was supposed to set forth and find my own way, they’d caved my foundation out from under me. Halfway through the graduation party, their simmering quarrel broke into shouts and my mother stormed off, not returning for several days. My brother and I could’ve easily cared for ourselves—the pantry was full—but my grandmother stuck around. She brought us swimming and made a dinner she called Himalayan burgers —sauteed ground beef served on pitas with spring greens and ranch dressing.
Eventually, she called me to the couch to revisit her gift, which had sat untouched by the fireplace. My grandmother showed me each book and told me why they were important.
She’d instilled a love of literature in me since I was young, lining my childhood shelves with Caldecott winners, slipping me five dollars to spend at the Village Book Store in Littleton. She lived in a ramshackle mansion on top of Tute Hill, with bay windows that overlooked rolling pine hills and turkeys nesting in crabapple trees. Her study was crammed with books, floor to ceiling, in custom-built pine shelves. During frequent overnight visits, she’d flutter in front of the bookcases, waving her fingers as if casting a spell, and pluck a curated selection to place next to the cozy bed she’d made for me with hand-sewn quilts laid over a slab of egg-crate foam. Tucked in the top book was always a writing prompt, and sometimes a new notebook or a snazzy pen. I was the eldest of fifteen grandchildren and she wasn’t shy about telling me I was her favorite. She’d draw letters on my back as I fell asleep, coding out secret messages, and after she left, I’d turn the light back on to read some more while stroking the spindly branches of a nearby potted Norfolk pine.
These tender moments with my grandmother meant everything to me, providing moments of stability while growing up with very young parents who were still figuring themselves out. But as I grew, her book recommendations didn’t land the way they once had. Her tastes skewed—in my opinion—a little tame, a little boring, and much too religious. I didn’t want to read about a potato peel society or Corrie Ten Boom. When we sat on the couch after my high school graduation and she told me how Faulkner had affected her at my age, I tuned her out. None of the books called to me. They’d each been written by a dead old white man who couldn’t possibly speak to the experience of being young, queer, and in love.
I’d been raised in a religious household and thus never spoke about my queerness. Even if I’d wanted to, I lacked both the language and an understanding for what churned inside me. My grandmother was my confidante in so many arenas—I could talk to her about academic struggles, interpersonal issues with friends, my frustrations with my changing body. But despite her insistence that she “didn’t have a problem with gay people,” that she was open-minded, I knew better. She was married to a man who prided himself on being outspoken on his prejudices against the queer community, which, for me, negated her platitudes. Sometimes words aren’t enough. So I kept who I was to myself.
At the time, my own literary interests included Janet Fitch and Haruki Murakami. Finding Mary Oliver’s poetry was revelatory as she instructed, “to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” I was attending a small state university in Farmington, Maine, and my grandmother would occasionally drive her Audi across New Hampshire to scoop me up for the weekend. She rattled the ice in her to-go cup of Coke when I asked her if she liked Oliver’s poetry, and gripped the steering wheel with soft, tan hands. “Every single one of Mary Oliver’s poems is about lesbian sex,” she said. “It’s all just smut.” I neither agreed nor understood, but I internalized that the queer sex I was having was wrong.
My sophomore year of college, I ran away from the woman I’d been entwined with to study abroad in Costa Rica. While there, I met a cute man in a hookah bar but instead of ending the night with a kiss as I’d hoped, I endured a sexual assault. Within the week, my cheeks ballooned and my eyes swelled shut. I became so ill that doctors administered a spinal tap and biopsied a lymph node in my neck as they tried to determine what was wrong with me. My afflictions were a terribly broken heart—and a severe case of Mono. My parents were both preoccupied with new partners so my grandmother took me in, once again making a cozy nest in her study. Despite my attempts to guard the trauma I’d just endured, she easily inferred something had happened. She brought me to a doctor's office and as I slid from the passenger seat, she squeezed my shoulder. “If you don’t want to talk about it, you can always write about it.”
For a month, I couldn’t do anything but sleep and sip at the broth she delivered at just the right temperature, the tea she brought in old McDonald’s cups that still smelled faintly of soda, but eventually I started flipping through books that had been waiting patiently beside my bed. Soon the writing assignments appeared again. And when I was up and walking around, she challenged me to participate in NaNoWriMo with her.
We spent the month of November cheering for one another, tapping at keyboards side by side on her white couch, commiserating about plot holes and unruly characters. We promised to swap manuscripts after completing the 50,000 word goal, but when I finished I knew she could never read it. Queer love and queer sex had permeated my pages. I didn’t write again for a decade, fearing what would happen if she ever read my stories.
When I was well enough to leave, she helped me buy a 1986 Toyota van, one year older than me, from a local auto shop she called “The Garage,” emphasizing the syllables to denote it was run by a gay couple: “The Gay-rahge.” It cost me seven hundred dollars (plus the staggered price of alternators as they periodically blew), and provided me a route across the country to my new home in Montana where I quickly fell in bed with man after man and an occasional woman, but pined after the one I’d run away from.
After I left, my grandmother gave away her house on Tute Hill to a Pennsylvanian church because God told her to. She moved to South Carolina, where the air smothered heavy and thick like sausage gravy over biscuits. Hers was a beige house among a Levittown of identical beige houses, serpentined in tight cul-de-sacs around Jim Bakker’s failed Christian amusement park. A stucco castle decayed just blocks away, rusted hinges squealing as open doors listed in the steamy breeze. My grandmother still wrote a poem a day, but without the vigor she once had, opting instead to scroll Facebook and play solitaire.
I attended college, worked abroad, and fell in love again, this time with a man. I pulled away from my grandmother, quietly and gradually. It wasn’t intentional, at first—I was busy. But I could sense her own incremental creeping away from me, too, deeper into southern conservatism and Christian ideals.
A younger cousin briefly dated a woman during this time, and unlike what I’d done in the past, she did so openly. I oscillated between emotions—awe, jealousy, and shame that I hadn’t been brave enough to do the same. In between the carouselling feelings, I paid close attention to how my grandmother reacted. She told everyone who would listen that she’d refrained from making a big deal out of it, and then continued on to parse and gossip and speculate when my cousin would go back to dating men. She neither spoke to my cousin about her new girlfriend, nor congratulated her, confirming my suspicions.
The pandemic struck, and when my grandmother refused to get vaccinated, I increased my distance from her. I told myself this was to protect her, to shield her from contracting the coronavirus, which was certainly a hefty component of my distance, but I was also dealing with my own personal upheaval. Despite joyfully marrying a man, despite starting a family with him and welcoming a daughter into the world, a part of me kept knocking around in the dark, demanding to be named.
I finally came out a year later. It was mid-pandemic so I could take the easy way out and proclaim myself as queer over Instagram. I knew my grandmother would hate it, not just due to my dynamic sexuality, but because she’d have to learn about it second-hand. She expected to be informed of news first so she could disseminate information herself. I’d indulged this unofficial rule with everything else: my engagement, my pregnancy, my career moves, my sexual assault. But I couldn’t tell her this one. I knew that my decision and my identity were demoting me from my status as her favorite. A week after I posted, she commented: “Big news,” without any signature emojis, without another mention.
She died before we could discuss it in person. Her church had continued holding weekly in-person services, encouraging attendees to forego masks, and live without fear. She contracted Covid and died from the virus just ten days after her seventy-ninth birthday.
While she was sick in the hospital, I spent two weeks listless and adrift between daily check-ins. I wandered the art museum, worked on puzzles, drank too much, showered too little. I indulged in something adjacent to prayer, pleading that she’d recover. And yet, my fingers already pricked with purpose. It was as if they somehow knew, and could sense the rustling in my gut, the reawakening of something stagnant before I did.
I wasn’t ready yet. I shoved my hands in my pockets and held fast, choosing instead to wallow in the grief.
I cried into a cousin’s shoulder as my grandmother’s poetry was read to the unmasked congregation. After the service, a clutch of short, round women donning leopard print powersuits approached me. “Are you the eldest grandchild?” they asked. “The one who writes?” I didn’t tell them that I hadn’t written in a decade. I hardly even read anymore. They hugged me, told me they were in her writing group, and said she was proud of me. One of them squeezed my elbow and got close enough that even through my mask I could smell Cheez-Its and peppermint gum on her breath as she whispered, “You were her favorite.”
When I returned home, it was as if carefully constructed walls came slamming down all at once. I wrote obsessively, and when I wasn’t typing or scribbling, I read. I devoured books as if words could feed me, save me, heal me—as if prose could fill me up and plug the gaping wound of loss. I posted the books I loved most to Instagram and an aunt replied, telling me she’d read one of my recommendations and loved it. She wrote that my grandmother would often suggest books but they never entertained my aunt, and that my grandmother didn’t like anything dark and dysfunctional. The disparity in tastes hadn’t just been with me.
This new knowledge gave me permission to tackle the topic I’d never touched, the one that had permeated my NaNoWriMo project all those years ago. Conjuring all the times I’d practiced stringing words together with my grandmother, I finally began to write about queerness and for the first time, words came easily. It was as if the fear and self-loathing rooted in my brain switched off and something long dormant took over. I could write without her judgment, while still using the tools she gave me.
When I found that old copy of Travels with Charley, I flipped through it gingerly, past multiple rips feathering the brittle brown pages. The final line on the very last page was underlined: “And that’s how the traveler came home again.” I can’t be sure who made the mark as it’s passed through untold hands since its genesis in 1963, but I like to think it was my grandmother. I imagine a benevolent aural version of her, dragging a spectral pencil under the text, encouraging me to write again, as she always did.
