Abbott, Alysia. Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father. Norton. Jun. 2013.272p.

摘要

After his wife died in the early 1970s, Steve Abbott embraced his homosexuality and moved to San Francisco with his young daughter, Alysia, whose touching memoir describes life with her poet-activist father and his openly gay lifestyle. From her memories and her father's journals, Abbott re-creates her childhood. While there was much love between father and daughter, Abbott communicates clearly how his pursuit of happiness involved choices that were made at the expense of her own. Abbott isn't interested in blame, though, as she vividly portrays the San Francisco scene for gays at a time of great change. She watches as friends, and then her father, contract AIDS, and at age 21, she returns home to help care for him and is conflicted over feelings of duty and the desire to begin a life of her own. Abbott captures feelings of a confusing childhood with passages of simple clarity to illustrate both struggle and devotion. VERDICT Insightful and well crafted, this book is useful both as a memoir and as a historical portrait of one of America's earliest gay communities.