GLR January-February 2026

ment and the mother’s quiet defensiveness. She has come be cause, in a rare phone call he made to her, she sensed that the son needed her. But he wants nothing from her, angrily rebuffing her strained attempts to get closer. They travel north, to Nara, to show the mother where her son used to live, and they seem to snipe at each other less. By the trip’s end, though, the son yells at the mother for what he sees as her failures as a parent. Flashbacks tell the mother’s story of growing up in a small town in Jamaica with her gay brother Stefan, her best friend Cheryl, and Cheryl’s boyfriend Earl. She dreams of getting out but, when the opportunity arises, she’s nervous about leaving Stefan behind. She initially moves to Canada then ends up in Houston. The descriptions of her slowly unfolding relationship with Ben are wonderful, as he shows her around Tokyo’s many cuisines and they gradually open up to each other. Even after living many years in Tokyo and going to the same expatriate gay bar night after night, the son feels isolated. A new wrinkle in his relationship with a married man leads to the phone call that brings his mother to town, while he begins hook ing up with another barfly. He drinks too much, stumbling home late at night. He remembers his childhood in Houston with his brother Chris, who had trouble with the law before joining the military. Gradually, he begins to develop real friendships with the bar owner and a small group of regulars and learns that re lationships can be flexible and inclusive. Washington, who lives in Tokyo, brings the city to life with descriptions of its trains, bars, and ethnic food; Ben and the mother get smoothies from an “American” stand. While not knowing the names of the son and mother feels strange at first, especially as all other characters have names, it soon seems nat ural and it becomes easy to keep track of them. Dialogue is pro vided without quotation marks, usually quick and casual. Black-and-white photos of Tokyo between chapters help the reader imagine this world. _________________________________________________________________ Charles Green is a writer based in Annapolis, Maryland.

R EGINALD H ARRIS Step Inside My Life THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF H. LAN THAO LAM by Lana Lin Dorothy, a publishing project. 224 pages, $18. L biography of Alice B. Toklas , which blurred the line between portrait and self-portrait, Lin narrates her story from the per spective of partner H. Lan Thao Lam. Also encouraged by Or anges Are Not the Only Fruit , by queer British author Jeanette Winterson—who considers that book a novel and not a memoir because life is “part fact, part fiction”—Lin attempts in her work to “expand the ‘I’ such that ‘I am I and I am Not-I.’” Her “au tobiography” explores what happens to one’s sense of self in a long-term relationship. An experimental filmmaker and associate professor at The New School in New York, Lin and her partner Lam, an inter disciplinary artist and associate professor of fine arts at the Par sons School of Design, have been creating work together since 2001. As Lin + Lam, they have exhibited mixed-media proj ects exploring history and collective memory at venues and film festivals throughout the world. Lin’s book can be read as part of the pair’s overarching goal of challenging how histori cal narratives are constructed and mediated. Lin writes: “Mem ory is selective. As I write this autobiography, I isolate moments that I can remember, divorcing them from other mo ments, and my life changes, its meanings change as I remem ber and misremember.” The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam begins with “Lan Thao Lam” passing along to readers what Lana Lin has told them of her youth as a burgeoning genderqueer Taiwanese American moving to New York City from Naperville, Illinois (Lam uses they/them pronouns). The narration of the couple’s lives then shifts, as Lin embodies Lam, recalling their early life in Vietnam and the harrowing experience of being a refugee be fore their family resettled in Canada. Lam sees poignant echoes of their own feelings while watching Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial . To them the visitor from another planet is “stranded in the San Fernando Valley as I felt in North America. ... I, who would have been a boy in a heartbeat if I could ... never identified with Elliott, the boy who befriends E.T. The nongen dered alien was truer to my heart.” Both Toklas and Stein offhandedly made vaguely racist ref erences to the couple’s many “Indo-Chinese” servants through out their writing. Lin points out that in Everybody’s Auto biography , for example, Stein recalls “having had so many that she cannot remember them all.” A close identification with the marginalization that Asians in North America often face was another impetus for The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam , a way of “bringing the understory to the surface.” Although structured chronologically, the book weaves ANA LIN both critiques and expands the range of Gertrude Stein with The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam . Taking as a model Stein’s 1933 classic The Auto

Prayer A prayer is like a poem though harder to perform A poem is for humans God knows we’re dumb A prayer is for our father our dom alpha dad I never edit as much as when I talk to him as if it’s the almighty revising for me as I go sussing out what I mean what breeders don’t know Poems and prayers alike are more for me alone

J OE B ISHOP

TheG & LR

40