Lone Stars follows the arc of four generations of a Texan family in a changing America. Julian Warner is a new dad wrestling with a question his husband posed: What will you tell our son about the people you came from, now that they’re gone? To find the answers, Julian must piece together the trails of his parents’ lives and the ways that they shaped his own—going back in time to Eisenhower’s immigration border raids, an epistolary love affair during the Vietnam War, crumbling marriages, queer migrations to Cambridge and New York, and the disorienting polarization of Obama’s second term. In the answers lies hope. The hope that Julian, like the generations who came before him, will somehow learn how to be a good parent. And the hope that by uncloseting ourselves—as immigrants, smart women, gay people—we will find power in empathy.