"If he was sometimes a failure as a parent, he was always a noble failure. He tried to do what he thought was best, even if he didn't always know what 'best' was or how to achieve it." With this perceptive observation, Alysia Abbott, in her elegant, forthright, and raw memoir (recently released as a paperback), summarizes both her single father raising her and the key elements of their unique father/daughter relationship and unconventional lifestyle. Her father was the gay poet/author Steve Abbott, who wrote for many San Franciscan publications, including the B.A.R., and died of AIDS in 1992.
One of the few qualms I have towards this marvelous book is Alysia's subtitle, "A Memoir of My Father." "Fairyland" is as much a memoir of her own life, as well as the story of San Francisco in the 1970s and 80s, especially queer bohemian life in the Haight Ashbury, and the AIDS epidemic. She seamlessly weaves these strands into a captivating tapestry. Relying primarily on the papers her father left, including his journals, poetry, prose, letters, drawings and cartoons, as well as interviews with family, friends, and her own recollections, she has not only recreated an era, but captured the zeitgeist of the period. It took her 20 years to process her feelings concerning her father before she could write about them.
Alysia begins with a traumatic event for which she has no memory: The death of her mother in an automobile accident when she was two years old. Her parents, both hippies, had met in Atlanta, GA, at an SDS party, and married a year later, despite Steve being bisexual. He would date men while they were together, as did she, including a suicidal patient she counseled as a psychologist, and who survived the crash that killed her. Living off her mother's social security checks and Steve's meager earnings as a poet, they started a new life in San Francisco. Fairyland charts her erratic upbringing, with several incidents that would cause any social worker to wince. Alysia, 4, almost drowned in a pool because no one was watching her, was exposed to rampant drug use at a very early age, and climbed into bed with her father's naked lovers. Steve was ill-equipped to be a parent, though he had the kind assistance of her maternal grandparents. Alysia spent summers at their Kewanee, IL home.
Steve wanted a place in the burgeoning SF literary world, and to find a man with whom he could share his life, who never materialized. They both grow up together as Steve learns fitfully to balance his responsibilities as a father with his own needs and desires. Alysia starts to define herself on her own terms. She enrolled in the French American bilingual school, where she is bullied by other kids, yet slowly makes friends. She wanted a "normal childhood" and didn't know any other children raised by a single gay father. She hid her father's sexuality from her grandparents and her friends, telling them her father had been so devastated by grief over her mother's death that he had no interest in pursuing another relationship. All the confusion and pain of being unconventional is detailed here.
One of the strengths of "Fairyland" is Alysia's fearlessness in revealing her father's flaws, his narcissism and neglectfulness, as well as her own deficiencies as a temperamental, selfish teen. Ultimately we admire her courage, resilience, and independence. Alysia never quite accepted his HIV+ and later AIDS diagnosis (which he reveals in a letter), especially that she would have to care for him, and he would probably die. She stays away in Paris or New York, where she attends NYU, as he wastes away in San Francisco, insensitive to his loneliness and fear. Since they can't afford long-distance phone calls, they write each other poignant letters, finally able to express their feelings and secrets to each other. Towards the end of "Fairyland," Alysia notes, "Dad could always make me feel better when the outside world made me feel strange. Dad was the one who loved me best of all." She attends to him in his final days at Maitri Hospice, dying four days before her 22nd birthday.
A sense of sadness, loss, and waste pervades the book, though Alysia is never sentimental. Her complex emotions toward her father and mother run the gamut, and though she hasn't lived in San Francisco in 20 years (she resides in Cambridge with her college professor husband) she concludes, "I still feel a part of this queer community. This queer history is my queer history." Fairyland will now become a vital part of the narrative history of our San Franciscan queer culture.
"Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father" by Alysia Abbott
W.W. Norton & Co.
$15.95