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. 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.
In Alysia’s teens, Steve’s friends-several of whom she has befriended-fall ill as AIDS starts its rampage through their community. The world, she learns, is hostile to difference. But the pair live like nomads, moving from apartment to apartment, with a revolving cast of roommates and little structure.Īs 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. 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. Steve throws himself into San Francisco’s vibrant cultural scene. 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. Yet, her fragile resolution is more honest than a tidy, suggesting that the most "outlandish" parts of our stories our own inade-quacies prove difficult to fully accept.A beautiful, vibrant memoir about growing up motherless in 1970s and ’80s San Francisco with an openly gay father.Īfter his wife dies in a car accident, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moves with his two-year-old daughter to San Francisco. Decades after the fact, it is clear she continues to struggle with her failures as daughter and caregiver. Colored with quirky, picturesque details of Bay Area counter culture, in-cluding its famous cafes, personalities, and periodicals, Abbott's narrative balances idiosyncratic flourishes with universal emotions of anger, resentment, jealousy, and guilt. When Steve was diagnosed with AIDS and asked her to come home, Abbott openly rebeled against the responsibility. Relocating from Atlanta to the West Coast soon after, the two formed a tenacious bond: "a traveling father-daughter act pulling schemes, subsisting on our charm, and always sticking together." But by her teenage years, the bohe-mian fantasy they shared and his efforts to beat depression and drug addiction wore thin and she moved away, first emotionally and then physically, to attend college in New York City and study in Paris. At two-years-old, Abbott's mother died, sparking Steve's homosexual awakening. In her memoir of growing in San Francisco during the 1970's and '80s, Abbott, the only child of poet, editor, and activist Steve Abbott, ruminates on a pivotal slice of American social and cultural history, drawing on her father's poems, journals, and letters to relate her painful personal history.
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