Alysia Abbott. (2013). Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father. W. W. Norton & Company.

Alysia Abbott. 2013. Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father. W. W. Norton & Company.

Alysia Abbott, Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013.

Alysia Abbott. Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013.

OverDrive Product Record

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1. • value: Bisexual
2. • value: AIDS
3. • value: 1970s
4. • value: San Francisco
5. • value: daughter
6. • value: California
7. • value: father
8. • value: Gay
9. • value: LGBTQ
10. • value: ca
11. • value: 1980s
12. • value: haight ashbury
13. • value: steve abbott

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   • fileAs: Abbott, Alysia
   • bioText: 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 family.
   • name: Alysia Abbott

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2013-06-03T00:00:00-04:00

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Fairyland

fullDescription

Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

In this vibrant memoir, Alysia Abbott recounts growing up in 1970s San Francisco with Steve Abbott, a gay, single father during an era when that was rare. Reconstructing their time together from a remarkable cache of Steve's writings, Alysia gives us an unforgettable portrait of a tumultuous, historic period in San Francisco as well as an exquisitely moving account of a father's legacy and a daughter's love.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Terry Gross, on "Fresh Air"
   • content: I'm so glad you wrote this book.
2. • premium: False
   • source: San Francisco Chronicle
   • content: Alysia beautifully remembers the innocence of the age between the disappearance of the Beats and the onset of AIDS.
3. • premium: False
   • source: Alison Bechdel, author of Are You My Mother?
   • content: 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.
4. • premium: False
   • source: Honor Moore, Author of The Bishop's Daughter
   • content: 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.
5. • premium: False
   • source: Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion: A Memoir
   • content: A beautiful, haunting book that instructs, even as it breaks our hearts.
6. • premium: False
   • source: Andrew McCarthy, author of The Longest Way Home
   • content: 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.
7. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: 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.
8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     May 20, 2013
     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. At two-years-old, Abbott's mother died, sparking Steve's homosexual awakening. 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. When Steve was diagnosed with AIDS and asked her to come home, Abbott openly rebeled against the responsibility. 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. Decades after the fact, it is clear she continues to struggle with her failures as daughter and caregiver. 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.

9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     May 15, 2013
     

     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.--Catherine Gilmore, Portland, OR

     Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      March 1, 2014
      

      Abbott's moving memoir of growing up with her gay activist-poet father, Steve Abbott, begins with her parents' unconventional marriage in Atlanta. When Abbott's mother was killed in the early Seventies, father and daughter moved to San Francisco, where he lived as an out gay man. Referencing his diaries and letters, the author re-creates their lives and presents a history of a vibrant gay community, the AIDS crisis, and her return to the United States at 21 to care for him in his last illness. (LJ 5/15/13)

      Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

In this vibrant memoir, Alysia Abbott recounts growing up in 1970s San Francisco with Steve Abbott, a gay, single father during an era when that was rare. Reconstructing their time together from a remarkable cache of Steve's writings, Alysia gives us an unforgettable portrait of a tumultuous, historic period in San Francisco as well as an exquisitely moving account of a father's legacy and a daughter's love.

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