Today marks the theatrical release of Fairyland, based on Alysia Abbott’s memoir about growing up with a single gay dad during the 1970s and 80s. Go see it—then read the book and these other memoirs by people who grew up with queer parents in roughly the same era.
For more on the film (and a trailer), please see my earlier post.
After you’ve seen it (or even before), I recommend reading Fairyland (W. W. Norton) itself. Abbott’s moving memoir tells of her childhood and young adulthood being raised by her single gay father in 1970s and 80s San Francisco. Her father, Steve Abbott, was a poet, author, editor, and a leading figure in the New Narrative poetry movement. After he died of AIDS-related complications in 1992, Alysia began reading his journals, and eventually interwove them with her own memories to create a compelling tale that is part history, part memoir, and part coming-of-age story. No matter how good a movie is, a book of the same tale often offers additional insights and a complementary experience.
After that, try:
Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter, by Alison Wearing (Knopf Canada). When Alison Wearing was 12, her father came out, leading to a divorce from her mother and a secret that Wearing, in 1970s Canada, felt she could not reveal. Wearing draws on her own memories, her father’s diaries and memorabilia, and conversations with her mother to create this beautifully written memoir that shows how each of them navigated the family changes that her dad’s revelation brought.
Affliction: Growing Up with a Closeted Gay Dad, by Laura Hall (She Writes Press). In 1975, when she was 24, author Laura Hall’s father came out to her. He and her mother had been married for over 30 years, and Laura had never suspected her father’s secret. Her mother, however, had known for 18 years, yet the two of them remained married until her death, a total of 64 years. Hall shows how her parents built a life together and raised four children, despite her father’s relationships with men, and what the impact of this double life was on all members of her family, especially on her as one of the few who knew his secret.
Ashes to Ink: A Memoir, by Lisa Lucca (JuJu House). In 1974, when author Lisa Lucca was 13, her mom and dad had recently divorced and she learned that her dad was gay. In this well-paced and thoughtful memoir that moves back and forth between the time after her dad came out and the time just after his death, Lucca shows us how her conflicted feelings about family and relationships, learned through the lens of her parents, impacted her own life and fraught romances. She is willing to lay bare and admit her own mistakes and imperfections, but also to look inward at the inflection points that helped turn her towards a truer sense of both herself and her father.
Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood, by Melissa Hart (Seal Press). Hart’s memoir tells of growing up in the 1970s separated from her mother, who lost custody of her children after she divorced their father and came out as a lesbian. More than a tale about a parent’s coming out, however, it is the story of a girl seeking her own identity as she moves between her father’s White, middle-class Los Angeles neighborhood and her mother’s adopted Latino one, and navigates the wider currents of race and culture in Southern California. Told with a keen, retrospective self-awareness and a dash of humor, it is an engrossing coming-of-age story by one of the first generation of queerspawn to identify as such.
