In 1974, when author Lisa Lucca was 13, her mom and dad had recently divorced and she learned that her dad was gay. At the time, there were no examples or support for children with queer parents. 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.
“Finding out my father was gay had answered some questions about their divorce but challenged everything I knew about who my parents really were, and about marriage itself,” she writes. Her mother was of little help, “as ill-equipped to deal with a teenager who rejected her homosexual father as any Midwestern mom in the 1970s would have been.” Lucca eventually realized that it was not her father’s being gay that upset her, but the fact that he married her mom and had a family anyway. Her mom and dad remained close friends, but Lucca still carried resentment—and her dad’s narcissism and lack of empathy didn’t help.
Lucca does not pull any punches in revealing her own early biases, shaped by societal homophobia. 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. Ultimately, she realizes that it was his personality, not his sexual orientation, that caused the tension between them, and that “Dad was difficult for reasons that had nothing to do with being gay.” Over the course of the book, we watch her learn, slowly, what she really wants from her own life and her relationships. She shows us the power of family bonds and of what can happen if we open ourselves up to understanding and forgiveness. While this book is centered on one woman’s relationship with her gay father, there is much here about the universal human desires for love and connection and about our capacity to change and grow.
