Alysia Abbott

discusses

Fairyland:
A Memoir of My Father

in conversation with MICHAEL BRONSKI

This event includes a book signing

Date

Jun
4
Tuesday
June 4, 2013
7:00 PM ET

Location

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Tickets

This event is free; no tickets are required.

Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome ALYSIA ABBOTT and Dartmouth College's MICHAEL BRONSKI for a discussion of Abbott's nonfiction debut, Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father.

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.

Alysia Abbott
Alysia Abbott

Alysia Abbott

Alysia Abbott is the author of Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, which won the ALA Stonewall Award and the Prix Madame Figaro, and has been translated into French, Spanish, Polish, and Portuguese. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, the New York Times Book Review, Vogue, Psychology Today, TriQuarterly, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. She leads the Memoir Incubator at GrubStreet in Boston and lives with her family in Cambridge, MA.

Photo credit: Amber Davis Toularentes

Michael Bronski
Michael Bronski

Michael Bronski

Michael Bronski is an independent scholar, journalist, and writer who has been involved in social justice movements since the 1960s. He is the author of numerous award winning books including The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash and the Struggle for Gay Freedom (1998) and Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics (2015). His most recent is A Queer History of the United States for Young People (2019). He is Professor of the Practice in Activism and Media in the Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University.

Harvard Book Store
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