Reviewed by Sarah Evans

“Younger youngsters suppose their households are the norm; as they transfer towards adolescence, they start to uncover the distinctions.”

This line that Ren Cedar Fuller drops in the course of her essay “Let Us Sit on the Garden” aptly describes the journey she embarks upon all through her guide, Greater: Essays (Autumn Home Press; October 2025).

It’s a theme all of us can relate to in a technique or one other. Till about second grade, I believed mayonnaise was the one condiment you might placed on a baloney-and-cheese sandwich as a result of that’s how my mother made it. When considered one of my finest buddies launched me to the magic of mustard, I felt remodeled. As I bought older, the household norms I dissected grew to become a lot deeper and darker — racist, homophobic, and misogynistic views that I struggled to unlearn.

In every of her essays, Fuller peels again layer after layer of her household’s methods. Typically it’s merely the act of turning into older, extra mature, and extra educated that helps her perceive what made her household completely different. Different occasions, she uncovers the distinctions via observing these whose methods of life differ tremendously from her personal.

Within the opening essay, “Naming My Father,” Fuller writes, “After I was younger, I didn’t know my father was uncommon.” So far as she knew, it was regular dad habits to kind out Bible verses on index playing cards and set up them with a self-created sorting system; explode if somebody didn’t use the proper colour of cup at dinner; and power your youngsters to memorize the names of the books within the Bible ahead, backward, and alphabetically. It wasn’t till Fuller began finding out neurodivergence as an grownup that she realized her father could have had undiagnosed autism. Fuller skillfully weaves her analysis on autism into the anecdotes of her father’s habits to additional emphasize her realization.

Fuller undertakes comparable analysis and evaluation to uncover the distinctions between others’ mothers and her personal. Components of this journey take Fuller all the way in which again to her mom’s childhood at a missionary boarding faculty in Ecuador. Her mother hardly ever talked concerning the faculty, however Fuller’s analysis revealed the traumatic situations her mom will need to have endured. In a single essay, written within the type of a scientific paper, Fuller investigates how Alzheimer’s has robbed her getting old mother of vocabulary and clear thought however made her happier within the course of.

In all her essays, Fuller doesn’t search to sentence or blame others. Slightly, she attracts upon her deep love for her household to craft delicate tales that concurrently reveal and shield their topics.

Fuller’s love is most evident when she writes about her personal baby, who by no means conformed to gender norms and ultimately got here out as transgender. As a straight, cisgender lady, Fuller is aware of that she can not absolutely perceive all her baby’s emotions and adolescent struggles. However she tries her finest to be loving, open, and trustworthy each step of the way in which. Her baby continues to increase Fuller’s world in methods she couldn’t have imagined, and her writings about this journey are refreshing in a society the place too typically we solely hear about households who reject their transgender youngsters.

Fuller embraces the variations she encounters in her personal previous, her mother and father’ previous, and her baby’s current and future, weaving them into precious tales of affection, connection, and empathy. In a time when individuals’s variations appear to have introduced us to an deadlock, maybe her guide may train us all a factor or two.