She wanted a 'normal childhood' and didn't know any other children raised by a single gay father. She enrolled in the French American bilingual school, where she is bullied by other kids, yet slowly makes friends. Alysia starts to define herself on her own terms. They both grow up together as Steve learns fitfully to balance his responsibilities as a father with his own needs and desires. 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. Alysia spent summers at their Kewanee, IL home.

Steve was ill-equipped to be a parent, though he had the kind assistance of her maternal grandparents. 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. Fairyland charts her erratic upbringing, with several incidents that would cause any social worker to wince. Living off her mother's social security checks and Steve's meager earnings as a poet, they started a new life in San Francisco. 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. Her parents, both hippies, had met in Atlanta, GA, at an SDS party, and married a year later, despite Steve being bisexual. It took her 20 years to process her feelings concerning her father before she could write about them.Īlysia 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. 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. She seamlessly weaves these strands into a captivating tapestry. 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. 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. 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. 'If he was sometimes a failure as a parent, he was always a noble failure.

Fairyland memoir