Her dad came out when she was in her mid-twenties. “Only in retrospect can I find clues to my father’s gayness,” she writes, and then turns to what the process was like for him:
He was allowing the truth to get closer: it was the galaxy at first, then global, then the continent, then local, and finally the shape of him, settling in. I don’t know what that must have felt like, to realize you have a body at the age of fifty-five.
Her observations are evocative, but also full of coming-out practicalities. “If it weren’t for the Internet,” she says, “I don’t know if my father would have realized, or been able to acknowledge, that he was gay.”
She also explores the impact that his coming out had on her: “We want our parents to be the norm from which we deviate. So when my dad came out, my instinct was that I needed to husband-up and get married. . . . My sister and I would be the adults. We would be conventional, conservative even.” Lucky for us, “This phase lasted about ten minutes.”
Brownstein, as it turns out, is bisexual herself. For the full story of her life so far, however, you’ll have to read her autobiography, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir
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