Mother Tongue of Secrets.

Taleen Mardirossian’s The Mother Tongue of All Secrets (The Sunday Long Read, September 12, 2026) is well worth your while; I’ll post a few excerpts so you can see why I wanted to share it: In the last months of her life, my grandmother started mentioning an unfamiliar name: Tony. At first, the name appeared in brief inquiries, like I wonder how Tony is or I wonder where Tony is. I didn’t think much of it. She was in the late stages of Alzheimer’s, and names had been slipping off her tongue for quite some time. […] My grandmother was a talkative woman in all four of the languages she spoke, but she had never told me anything about anyone named Tony. Who was he? And how could I unravel a secret hidden in a name that my grandmother denied recognizing but couldn’t stop saying? I didn’t know where to start. […] My grandmother’s parents were Armenian Genocide survivors who were born in Kilis, a province in the Ottoman Empire in what is now Turkey, where many Armenians didn’t speak Armenian…