A sympathetic and deeply moving story.
A writer and former WNYC radio producer's lovingly crafted memoir about growing up with her gay poet dad in San Francisco during the 1970s and ’80s.
Abbott, her mother, Barbara, and her father, Steve, lived an unconventional but happy life in Atlanta until the night when Barbara was killed in a car accident. The author, 3, was inconsolable, and her bisexual father was “so distraught over [Barbara’s] death that he turned gay” (as her young mind conceived of it at the time) and never had a relationship with another woman again. With nothing left in Atlanta, Steve took his daughter to San Francisco to begin a new life. The pair moved into the bohemian, gay-friendly Haight-Ashbury district. In between doing odd jobs to support himself and his daughter and falling in and out of love with the wrong men, Steve became editor at the influential poetry journal, Poetry Flash. He also turned to Zen Buddhism to help him recover from drug and alcohol dependence. Meanwhile, the increasingly self-conscious author struggled to come to terms with being the child of a gay parent whose queerness “became my weakness, my Achilles heel.” Then, just as Steve began to find recognition as a poet and peace in the troubled relationship he had with his now-collegiate daughter, he developed AIDS. Deeply conflicted, Abbott returned to San Francisco from New York to take care of her father, who died a year later. What makes this story especially successful is the meticulous way the author uses letters and her father’s cartoons and journals to reconstruct the world she and her father inhabited. 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.Pub Date: June 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-08252-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
PROFILES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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