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Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, by Alysia Abbott
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A beautiful, vibrant memoir about growing up motherless in 1970s and ’80s San Francisco with an openly gay father.
With a new foreword
After his wife dies in a car accident, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moves with his two-year-old daughter to San Francisco. There they discover a city in the midst of revolution, bustling with gay men in search of liberation—few of whom are raising a child.
Steve throws himself into San Francisco’s vibrant cultural scene. He takes Alysia to raucous parties, pushes her in front of the microphone at poetry readings, and introduces her to a world of artists, thinkers, and writers. But the pair live like nomads, moving from apartment to apartment, with a revolving cast of roommates and little structure. As a child Alysia views her father as a loving playmate who can transform the ordinary into magic, but as she gets older Alysia wants more than anything to fit in. The world, she learns, is hostile to difference.
In Alysia’s teens, Steve’s friends—several of whom she has befriended—fall ill as AIDS starts its rampage through their community. While Alysia is studying in New York and then in France, her father tells her it’s time to come home; he’s sick with AIDS. Alysia must choose whether to take on the responsibility of caring for her father or continue the independent life she has worked so hard to create.
Reconstructing their life together from a remarkable cache of her father’s journals, letters, and writings, Alysia Abbott gives us an unforgettable portrait of a tumultuous, historic time in San Francisco as well as an exquisitely moving account of a father’s legacy and a daughter’s love.
- Sales Rank: #177034 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-06-03
- Released on: 2013-05-28
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Booklist
*Starred Review* The child of quintessentially 1960s parents, Abbott lost her mother to a car accident when she was only two. Determined to raise her, Steve Abbott took her along to San Francisco. There, he sparely supported her through the many moves consequent upon his bohemian lifestyle as a newly out homosexual and a writer-editor determined to make his mark on S.F.’s poetry scene. At last they settled into a one-bedroom place (she got the real bedroom, while the living room doubled as his) in the Haight-Ashbury district that she would call home for 17 years, until Steve’s death from AIDS in 1992. She resumed the life she’d started in New York and never returned. But no repudiation of her father and the unconventional circumstances in which he raised her was involved in her decision to relocate. She never doubted his love because he never gave her cause; he was a devoted, even doting parent despite his very open gayness. She has maintained his reputation for two decades now (see steveabbott.org), and she writes up to a standard that would do any writer-parent proud. If there’s plenty of emotion in her recollections, they lack all sentimentality, sensationalism, and special pleading. Like Ira Wagler’s Growing Up Amish (2011), a tale of another radically different, unusual upbringing, Fairyland is written in shiningly clear, precise prose that gives it literary as well as testimonial distinction. --Ray Olson
Review
“I’m so glad you wrote this book.” (Terry Gross, on “Fresh Air”)
“Doubles as a portrait of a city and a community at a crucial point in history. . . . funny, strange, and sweet.” (New Yorker)
“Alysia beautifully remembers the innocence of the age between the disappearance of the Beats and the onset of AIDS.” (San Francisco Chronicle)
“Generous, precise, and deeply moving, Fairyland is a love story that not only brings a new generational perspective to a history we’re in danger of forgetting, but irrevocably shifts the way we think about family itself.” (Alison Bechdel, author of Are You My Mother?)
“Gorgeous. . . . As a chronicle of the moment when the San Francisco of Armistad Maupin became the city of Harvey Milk, when gay and experimental poetry flourished in California, Fairyland is vivid and indelible. As the portrait of a conspiracy of love between a father and a daughter, it is heartrending, a brilliant addition to the literature of American memoir.” (Honor Moore, Author of The Bishop’s Daughter)
“A beautiful, haunting book that instructs, even as it breaks our hearts.” (Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion: A Memoir)
“Clear-eyed and heartrending, Fairyland captures a singular time and place in American history. It also captures something much more important: what it means to be truly loved―and to love truly. A beautiful book.” (Andrew McCarthy, author of The Longest Way Home)
“As she depicts the dynamics of a unique, occasionally fraught, gay parent–straight child relationship, Abbott offers unforgettable glimpses into a community that has since left an indelible mark on both the literary and social histories of one of America’s most colorful cities. A sympathetic and deeply moving story.” (Kirkus Reviews)
About the Author
Alysia Abbott's work has appeared in Real Simple, Salon, and TheAtlantic.com. She is a graduate of the New School's MFA program and was a contributing producer at WNYC radio. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and two children.
Most helpful customer reviews
38 of 40 people found the following review helpful.
The compelling story of a little girl growing up in gay San Francisco
By Neurasthenic
This book has a perfect title, a perfect cover, and the author has a memorable and easily shared personal history. On the strength of these alone, I expect that this book will be widely read and discussed, and perhaps will even become standard reading in gay & lesbian studies programs. Though it is at heart a simple story of a sort seen in countless works of young adult fiction, about a girl raised by her father after the death of her mother in a car accident, Abbott uses this to discuss numerous vital themes. More than perhaps any other book I've recently read, I expect this one will have broad cultural impact.
I don't think I can discuss this book without a bit of a spoiler (forgive me, but this much is given away on the book jacket anyway). Abbot is raised by her gay father in bohemian circumstances in San Francisco. It sounds like the setup for a sitcom (imagine them critiquing each other's outfits, or boyfriends, perhaps), but there is little humor here. Abbott's story feels fraught with peril from almost the first page, though we already know the outcome -- that she survives and he does not. Abbot's approach to this story is relentlessly earnest, and some of the investigation of her family's past evokes the great "My Dark Places."
Her sense of time and place will resonate to anyone of her generation (those who went to high school in the 1980s); some aspects may be specific to struggling bohemians of San Francisco but it is a testament to the great leveling power of American popular culture that Abbott's preferences in music and blue jeans will be immediately recognizable to those of us who grew up in far different circumstances in other parts of the country.
Her father was an impoverished poet and cartoonist and sometimes gay activist. It is amusing, and really not surprising from the perspective of adulthood, that her family's bohemian status starts as a social liability but is an asset by junior high. She quotes some of his poetry in the story, and illustrates some episodes with his own cartoons about the same events.
The book is effortlessly political; Abbott refers explicitly to the campaign against homosexuals led by orange juice pitchwoman Anita Bryant, but otherwise she leaves our broader national debate on the subject in the background. It presumably informs the behavior of those of her mother's relatives who treat Abbott poorly, but it's not Abbott's role to argue that homosexuals deserve the same rights as everybody else, this conclusion is to her so fundamental as to be beneath articulating. Debates over homosexual rights in America often center around their threat to children (or more nebulously to "the family"), and so Abbott's experience is useful even if she does not explicitly hold it out to us as a political lesson. Reactionaries claim that homosexuals will be corrupting parents, and that they will, accidentally or deliberately, program their children to be similarly homosexual. Abbot would scoff at this of course. Her personal history does however demonstrate one drop of truth in reactionary claims -- her father was not ready to raise a child and if not for the generous involvement of her grandparents and a couple of adults outside the family who provided protection and guidance, the reader can not help but think that Abbott's life might have turned out quite badly. However, in the main Abbott's life stands as a powerful testament against the bigots' views -- you will not find anybody who was raised in more gay an atmosphere than she was, and she's grown to be an urbane and articulate writer and soccer mom in Cambridge, MA, married to a (male) college professor. She is, in a word, normal, and I suspect that any parent, whether gay, straight, divorced, widowed, or whatever, would be delighted to have a child turn out so well.
The cover photo is perfect. Not since Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil has a photo so well captured the complex themes of a nonfiction book.
I've only a couple of nits to pick. I wish Abbott had identified sources on the dialog she quotes but can't possibly have remembered herself. Did she speak with other participants? Did her dad summarize in his journal? Is she merely extrapolating? Note for example the discussion of the first poetry reading she attended with her father, at the age of six. Every participant is named, their outfits are described, she quotes their poetry, all as though she remembered it herself. Is this a fabrication? Did somebody film it? Why doesn't she just say "Remarkably, so-and-so was filming that night, and I could watch . . . "
Also some passages are perhaps overwritten. Never enough to say "the present tense" when she can say "that most exciting of tenses --the present."
These are however minor points, and will not derail a reader from rapidly completing, and discussing with others, this fascinating book.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Captures San Francisco - and an unconventional childhood - exceptionally well
By Jay Hinman
I moved to San Francisco right out of college in 1989, and was raised in the shadow of it, an hour down the peninsula in San Jose. The City (capital C, of course) was, by the time I was moving in, consumed by an AIDS crisis that was killing young men in the low hundreds every single month. I lived in the Haight-Ashbury, just blocks from where "FAIRYLAND"'s author Alysia Abbott grew up with her gay poet/writer father, Steve Abbott - and where she was caring for him as he died from AIDS as well. It was a weird time. San Francisco is such a gay city, and AIDS activists and organizations and marches and hospice care fundraisers were everywhere at that time. The documentary film "We Were Here", which is excellent, tells the story very well. As a non-gay male whose main and almost exclusive interests in the early 90s were rocknroll, record collecting and starting my work career, I found the AIDS crisis both easy to ignore and impossible to get away from. I wanted to read Abbott's book to get a better sense of her San Francisco, the one I lived in or near for much of the same time, and at the same age (early 20s) - but also because her memoir of growing up in a loose, ever-shifting sort of bohemia with her dad sounded like a terrific ride. It was.
"FAIRYLAND" is a memoir that I recommend to anyone unconditionally. Primarily, Abbott tells an excellent chronological tale of her girlhood, teenage years and young adulthood in a non-maudlin, often self-effacing and extremely loving manner toward her father, who raised her on a wing and a prayer all by himself. Her parents were educated and radical grad student activists and hippies in Atlanta who married young, lived fast and, in her mother's case, died very young. They married despite her knowledge that her husband-to-be was bisexual and, as it turned out, later to be exclusively gay. In fact, Steve Abbott was radicalized by Stonewall in 1969, so we're talking about someone who was "out and proud" very early, to his credit. Alysia Abbott writes very well, piecing together her father's recollections and journal entries, of her young mother's struggles with her new husband's boyfriends and about the almost monthly personal growth she was undergoing from 60s wild child to somewhat responsible mother.
That said, Alysia Abbott pulls no punches throughout this book on the shortcomings of her parents, and more importantly, those of herself. The pain she feels even writing about her teenage selfishness and her naive/fearful neglect of her lonely and eventually dying father, without her even having to say it, is obviously immense, and she reprints letters that she wrote him that must have been painful to re-read 20 years later, let alone share with the world. It's also clear that she was, on the whole, a wonderful and loving daughter, and the true light of her dad's too-short life. Steve Abbott is painted as a complex but exceptionally good-hearted man, one who was sure of his sexuality and creative calling as a poet/artist/bohemian, yet who struggled with feelings of self-worth and with loneliness. You wonder, as Alysia does, what their life might have been like had her mother Barbara lived. Would it have even been together? Not likely - but it is possible it would have made for a different, but equally good book.
The dissonance of being a gay man raising a daughter in free-swinging, liberated 70s and early 80s San Francisco must have been a minefield. Alysia Abbott writes of how jarring it was for her, simultaneously embracing her father's friends and lifestyle while often yearning for the quote-unquote normal childhoods she saw on TV and that she observed in her friends. Think, though, of Steve Abbott's uniqueness as a gay dad, back in a time when no one had a gay dad that they lived with. Marriages would instantly dissolve when one parent came out as gay in the 70s, and the children would almost always be placed with the straight parent. This was not an option in the Abbott household, nor would either of them ever wished for any alternative but the one they were given. Steve Abbott often found himself on the periphery of the gay community, wanting to be more active, to date more, to go out more - and yet wholly devoted to raising his daughter in the best ways he knew how.
The memoir also does a terrific job recounting young Alysia's humorous experiences with many San Francisco-centric touchstones: the poetry readings and internecine warfare amongst the literary set; "The Quake", the new wave/Rock of the 80s station that we both listened to in the Men Without Hats era; the gay scene in the Castro and at Café Flore; and the dawn of grunge in the Haight, with gutter punks, skinheads and street kids and late nights at the I-Beam and Nightbreak. That I myself was very much present for. I even drove past her old place at 545 Ashbury the other day while in the midst of reading the book, to get a better frame of reference for her San Francisco - wow. Regardless of her father's sexuality and their life circumstances, there's little doubt that her childhood would have had major and significant differences from mine in the safety and comfort of suburban Sacramento and San Jose.
It's touching and powerful when you realize toward the middle of the book that the "differently-parented" Alysia Abbott writing the book did not have to go through a crucible of drug use, depression and inner pain to write a memoir as powerful as she did. In fact, she seems to have turned out just great. She benefited from summers-long stints at her grandparents on her mother's side's house in Illinois, which provided her with a more conventional worldview to balance out her otherwise very unconventional youth. She was placed into a first-rate private French school, one that is still there now. Finally, Alysia Abbott had her father, who - cliché as it may be for me to write - helped shape her into the person and the writer that she is today. Her book ends with Steve Abbott's inevitable and exceptionally sad death, though she does not milk it any more than is necessary to cleanly wrap up this coda in her tale, and ends the book with a short epilogue that ties the story into an elegy for the many, many men that were dying in horrible ways across San Francisco in the 80s and 90s - when many of us were looking the other way. It's a powerful piece of writing, and a terrific memoir that succeeds on just about every level.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
A different slice of life described painfully but beautifully
By Sandra
I really enjoyed this well written memoir by the age 40-something daughter of an openly gay father growing up in the tumultuous 70s and 80s in san francisco. I was born in the same year as the author's father and I have 2 sons about the same age as the author. I also spent my university and graduate school years in california, near san francisco. But if I were to write a memoir of my life, there would be virtually no overlap with the father's life style, parenting or emotions. So this book opened my eyes to a slice of life so near and yet so far from what I know. Fascinating. Drugs, bisexuality, homosexuality, self-indulgence, openness with a child beyond anything I could imagine---all this described with poetry and not sensationalism or depression, through the eyes of a beautiful and lonely soul who continued to adore her father despite painful moments, many of them, culminating with her father's death after he summons his 22-year-old daughter back to san francisco to care for him in his final weeks dying of aids. I was left torn open emotionally but inspired by the book which must have been so cathartic to the author in its writing.
I must also say that the book's cover is wonderful both before and after you read the memoir--the father and his brave daughter dressed up for a night out in fairyland.
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