"Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father," by Alysia Abbott

“Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father” (Norton, 2013), by Alysia Abbott, is a very San Francisco story. The author writes of, after her mother died in an accident when Alysia was two years old, living with her gay poet/writer/journalist/editor father Steve Abbott in the Haight Ashbury section of San Francisco. While her father was becoming involved in the (intersecting) literary and gay and activist scenes in the San Francisco of the 1970s and 1980s, Alysia was very close to him but also hid her father’s gayness from her friends. Tragically, as was far too common in the early 1980s, when Alysia was a young adult, Steve contracted AIDS and eventually died of it. This is a sad yet loving and life-affirming memoir of an unusual (especially for that time period) upbringing. While not being afraid to be critical of some aspects of her father’s parenting, the author writes with great affection for him and great appreciation of all he did for her in difficult and sometimes lonely circumstances as a single gay dad at a time before this situation was common. Besides being a poignant memoir, this book portrays an important and vibrant time in the life of the city of San Francisco: the political, social, and literary movements of the times. Although I was only very tangentially involved in these movements (mostly as an onlooker), I well remember the changes in the city at the time. The university where I taught then and still teach is only a few blocks from the Haight, and the LGBT movement was growing and becoming more public at around the same time as the women’s/feminist movement that was (and still is!) so important to me. I went to some readings and other literary and political events involving San Francisco writers at the time, including some of the beat era. "Fairyland" actually mentions my university, and at least two of its faculty members whom I knew (one a well-known poet); Steve Abbott taught writing there for a few years, but I did not know him. The memoir also mentions the memorable occasion, which I attended, when Alan Ginsberg did a dramatic (at times scatological) reading in front of a packed audience at the Jesuit university; I still remember the mixture of laughter and applause on the part of some in the audience and a kind of stunned silence on the part of others. And of course I knew, as everyone in San Francisco did, some people (almost all gay men) who suffered from and then died of AIDS. I also knew a few admirable doctors and nurses who worked with HIV/AIDS patients despite concerns about possible contagion. Additionally, I knew a few HIV-positive men who lived long enough to benefit from new treatments that kept them alive and relatively healthy for decades more, many into the present. An educator friend of mine falls into this category, and is still teaching at another institution in the Bay Area; he recently posted on social media, on the occasion of a "big" birthday, that he never thought he would reach his current age. Steve Abbott, like far too many of his contemporaries, died a couple of years too soon to benefit from these treatments. His daughter’s memoir of his life honors him and brings him to life for readers.