Book review: Fairyland, by Alysia Abbott

by Alysia Abbott
Norton
4 stars

was the name Alysia Abbott and her father gave to San Francisco, where she grew up in that city's gay community of the 1970s and '80s. Steve Abbott, a writer and cartoonist who died of Aids in 1991, struggled to bring up his daughter in a stable household. But Alysia's childhood wasn't much of a fairyland, given their bohemian poverty and the pressure she felt to conceal her father's gay life from her friends, extended family and the world beyond.

Drawing on extraordinary resources - Steve's journals, poems, cartoons, novels, essays and letters - Abbott spent two decades after his death trying to understand who her parents were. Along the way, she strives to restore her father's literary reputation and battle the "cultural amnesia" that followed the first waves of Aids-related deaths.

Abbott doesn't excuse her dad's early inadequacies as a single parent: at three, she nearly drowned at a pool party while Steve talked to a friend; on her own, she had to learn how to negotiate San Francisco's maze of streetcars. And yet, to the end, father and child cared for each other deeply, bound by an early tragic loss. "If he was sometimes a failure as a parent, he was always a noble failure," she writes. "It wasn't easy being a gay father in the 1970s. There were no books on gay parenting … no models."

This story begins in Atlanta. Steve came from the Midwest to attend Emory; Barbara Binder, also from the Midwest, was an Emory grad student. They met at a student meeting and eventually married; their daughter arrived in 1971.

In Abbott's account, her mother didn't have a problem with Steve's same-sex relationships. The couple hung out at Atlanta's Midtown gay bars, and there was plenty of craziness and dope at their home on Peachtree Street. Then, in 1973, Barbara was killed in a car crash. Traumatised, father and child headed to San Francisco the following year.