When Castellano first started her channel, becoming a “cancer vlogger” wasn't her intention, she simply wanted to talk about makeup. Following her diagnosis, a family friend taught Castellano how to decorate her face with colorful eye shadows and lipsticks as a distraction. She came to love watching makeup tutorials. “Eventually she thought, ‘You know what? I could do this. I’m good enough to do what they do,’” says Castellano’s mom, Desirée. In 2011, the pre-teen began uploading her own bubbly tutorials and haul videos, which she’d film and edit on her laptop in her bedroom. It wasn’t until Castellano’s budding viewership began asking personal questions—why she didn’t have hair, for example—that she decided to talk about her disease. “She started raising awareness for childhood cancer through her videos, and the channel blew up,” recalls her sister Mattia, now 23. By 2012, her influence as an advocate landed her an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and she was named an honorary CoverGirl by the cosmetics company.
“Every morning I would wake up in the hospital with nothing to do. I'd basically just spend my day watching other people on YouTube,” says Gall of the impetus for her channel. “Eventually I thought, What would be so hard if I made these videos?”
He is more than ready to move forward, as feisty, as fiery and as occasionally prone to fly off the handle as he has ever been. Still, he cannot help but take stock and wonder how the experience — just the latest in a series of tests that life has hurled at him — has made him who he is.
As he said to me that morning, “I have to ask myself, because of what I’ve been through, was I better then or am I better now?” Almost immediately, he answered himself: “I’m a better man now,” he said. “I’d rather be a good man than a funny man, any day.”
What I’ve realized is that I like dreaming about what old dishes would be. I like imagining where they would be eaten and by whom, how they might be served, what conversation and convention punctuate their eating, what time of day, what weather, what energies drive eaters to that table and from it. I do like reading their instructions. I just don’t like to follow them. I like to take what I can. It’s sometimes a particularly good way of describing one step of a process, or the suggestion of a way of life — involving long lunches and wild strawberries — or a really wonderful general idea for a dish, with a lovely and evocative name.
But as Nguyen writes, language allows for many homes, and perhaps the writers — and readers of the anthology too — will succeed in returning home, or finding a home, through these words.
The subtitle of “The Last Equation of Isaac Severy” by Nova Jacobs is “A Novel in Clues.” How clever, maybe even a bit twee. Is Jacobs about to lead readers on a choose-your-own-adventure chase? In a way, yes.
Yes, the success of A Brief History took everyone (including its author) by surprise. But it succeeded for good reason. The book revealed a profound truth that had been largely ignored: We desperately want to understand our place in the cosmos. And if a guide comes along who can help us make sense of it all, we’re willing to listen.