Jessi Hempel came out as a lesbian in college. Then her father was outed as gay, her sister came out as bisexual, and their brother came out as a trans man. Yet their collective queerness—even their dad’s revelation, perhaps the most shocking—is not in itself what caused their White, middle-class family to fracture. Hempel explores what did, a legacy of secrets and past traumas, and how, over years, they managed to heal.
Hempel’s mother lived with depression, bound up with a traumatic experience of her youth involving an infamous serial killer. Her behavior was often unpredictable, puzzling and disturbing to young Jessi. Her father, raised by a conservative Christian father, was often absent, traveling on business. One can see the cracks in her parents’ relationship long before her father came out, and the behaviors the children adopted to protect themselves.
While Jessi came out as a lesbian before her father, it is her father being outed that set their family on the road to being torn apart, even as each person’s long-ingrained habits sometimes made things worse. Yet when things seemed irreparable, “improbably, we grew into a family again—a different kind of family, reflecting a new set of values,” Hempel tells us (in the Prologue, so this is hardly a spoiler).
How they did so forms the weave of the narrative, which Hempel bases on her own remembrances as well as discussions with each of her family members during the COVID pandemic. As she reminds us, though, “There is no one story of a family, but instead competing stories that contain overlapping truths, some of which are contradictory.” She shares some of these truths with us as she tells of her father’s coming out with gusto after being outed, her and her sister’s involvement with COLAGE (the organization for those with LGBTQ parents), her brother’s transition, her own relationships and those of her siblings, and her mother, who attempts to die by suicide, eventually turning what she learns through therapy into a way to help others. She shows how she and her siblings found their ways back to each other and to their parents, and even had children of their own. (Her brother carried his child, giving us yet another example of a trans man who did so.) Perhaps most strikingly, she shows how their being queer, and the personal searching and community connections that this led them to, was ultimately a tool for healing.
This is a memoir of family secrets, hidden, revealed, and reconciled. It is a story of personal growth and change, of grief and healing, family and community. Not all families look like theirs, but it will be a rare person who will not gain something from their story.
