Guest
Host
Related Topics
Other segments from the episode on October 17, 2025
Transcript
DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli. The newly released movie "Fairyland," produced by Sofia Coppola and directed by Andrew Durham, stars Scoot McNairy as a gay single father raising his daughter in San Francisco in the 1970s. It's based on a memoir of the same name by Alysia Abbott, who wrote about growing up in the early years of the gay rights movement in the capital of gay America, San Francisco.
It's not uncommon now to see children with gay parents, but it was uncommon when she was raised by her gay father in the 1970s and '80s. Her father, Steve Abbott, was a poet, essayist and editor. In 1969, when he married the woman who became Alysia's mother, he described himself as bisexual. Both of them were graduate students at Emory University in Atlanta. Alysia writes that while her parents shared a bed and a life, her father helped organize Atlanta's Gay Liberation Front and was the gay lib editor at Atlanta's alternative weekly, The Great Speckled Bird.
Two years after Alysia was born, her mother was killed in a car accident. Soon after, her father decided they would move to San Francisco, and the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood became their home. Steve Abbott died of AIDS-related complications in 1992. Terry Gross spoke with Alysia Abbott in 2013. Her memoir is based in part on her father's journals.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
TERRY GROSS: Alysia Abbott, welcome to FRESH AIR. I'm so glad you wrote this book because I feel like we - or at least I - have read a lot more about what it's like to be a gay parent than what it's like to be a child of a gay parent. And I haven't read anything about a child of a gay parent at the dawn of the age of the gay liberation era. Do you feel like this gives you a kind of unique perspective on that era?
ALYSIA ABBOTT: Yes. I mean, I think that the experience of being a child of a gay parent in my generation or a child a gay parent coming of age today is very different. Most of the children born of gay parents in the first two decades after Stonewall, those children were the products of heterosexual unions, usually straight marriages. And so in those situations, typically the parent was closeted and would come out after the child was born, and either the parents would divorce or maybe the parent wouldn't come out. But usually, in those situations, the child would live with one of the parents, and because the way the courts were set up, they were often living with the straight parent or sometimes with the mother.
My situation was unique because my mother died, and so there really wasn't anyone, clearly, who I was going to live with other than my father. So he was - I was living in an exclusively gay-headed household from as early as I can remember. Children today, they are usually the product of a gay couple who would either adopt a child or go through a process of artificial insemination to have a child, but it's very much they are as a couple wanting to have a child together. So I had a very different situation when I was young. There was very few gay parents, or especially few gay-headed households, so that I knew very few kids like myself growing up.
GROSS: There's a section from your memoir - from early in your memoir - that I want you to read. And this is really, like, your prehistory. It's about how your parents met. And so you're not even born yet in the passage I'm going to ask you to read, but I think it kind of sets the context for your birth and for the situation that you and your father found yourself in.
ABBOTT: Yes. (Reading) When my parents first met at an SDS party, and my father told my mother he was bisexual, she answered, that means you can love all of humanity instead of just half of it. It was 1968 and everyone was talking about revolution. My father had just returned from a summer in Paris. The city was still roiling from the May riots when students had shouted, be reasonable, demand the impossible. Now, in the halls of American academia, antiwar students were shutting down campuses from UC Berkeley to Columbia.
(Reading) My mother was intrigued by my father's open approach to sexuality. She never got hung up on his boy crushes like his other girlfriends had. She was only jealous of his relationships with women and, according to Dad, even liked the guys he was attracted to. On weekends, they went to the Cove and to the other gay and mixed bars that dotted the outskirts of downtown Atlanta. There, my mother picked out the young men my father could never attract on his own - men who'd never consider a gay encounter, but who'd be up for a drunken three-way.
(Reading) In those early years of the sexual revolution, it was hip for young people to try new combinations. Sometimes, my mom would dress in men's clothing when they went out. Dad said she made a cute boy. Other weekends, my parents hosted dinner parties, entertaining the antiwar and grad student friends with spaghetti, cheap red wine and charades. Dad wrote about feeling satisfied at the close of these evenings, seeing himself and my mom as leaders of a salon of intellectually engaged students.
(Reading) As they cleaned up after one such party, my mom suggested they marry. Landlords won't hassle us so much, she reasoned. We'll be able to stock the kitchen and house with wedding presents. My parents will give us more money. Other than that, our life won't really change.
GROSS: But, of course, everything changed. You know, four months after your parents married, Stonewall happened. And your father came out in Emory University's school newspaper. And then you were born soon after your parents married. Was it - what? - about nine months after?
ABBOTT: Yes. My parents were married in February 1969, and I was born in December 1970.
GROSS: And what you later learned was that your mother insisted on having you, insisted on having the baby when she found out she was pregnant, but your father had serious reservations. He had thought she was using birth control, and she didn't tell him that she'd stopped. What was it like for you to read that in his journals?
ABBOTT: Well, I think I was aware that I was in an accident, but I wasn't aware that my mother had told my father that she had stopped using birth control and that she hadn't and had me. So that came as a surprise. I think I was also surprised by my father's reaction. The fact that he didn't want to have a child didn't jive with my experience with - of him as a father, which - he was always a very attentive and loving father. And so that was a surprise.
GROSS: He was seeing men, and your mother had gotten involved with a man who was a drug addict and a dealer, and he was arrested for running guns and drugs across the Canadian border. She went to bail him out. The charges were dropped. On the way to taking him back home, they were in a car accident and she was killed. And suddenly, your father, who wasn't really ready to be a father, was your only parent. Your aunt had offered to adopt you, but your father insisted on keeping you. Considering his reservations about being a parent, do you feel like you understand why he kept you?
ABBOTT: Absolutely. For one thing, my father wrote about in his journals feeling this connection with me after I was born. So before I was born, he wasn't necessarily very enthusiastic about having a child. But after I was born, he really enjoyed spending time with me. And actually, for a short period, he was a sort of househusband - before even John Lennon was a househusband - working from home, trying to sell his work while my mother was working a nine-to-five job.
And so after my mother's death, I think my father felt like he didn't have very much. His relationship with a young man that he had while he was with my mother had dissolved. And he, in a sense, felt that I was all that he had in the world and he was all that I had in the world. So I don't think he could have imagined letting my aunt or anyone else take over raising me.
GROSS: When you were a young child, after your mother died, your father decided to move to San Francisco. So you and he moved there. And early on, he had other roommates living with you, including one or two men who were drag queens. And I'm wondering what your reaction was - at a very young age, when you hadn't been exposed to much at all. So nothing - in some ways, nothing's unusual when you're very young 'cause everything's new (laughter).
ABBOTT: Exactly.
GROSS: So what was your reaction to seeing, you know, men who you were living with in dresses and lipstick?
ABBOTT: Well, I mean, my father had already been sometimes wearing dresses in Atlanta. I think, for my father, wearing a dress was a political statement. When we were in San Francisco and we were living with two men, one of whom was a drag queen full-time and another one who would sort of dress up to go out, I really saw it as play. At the time I would have been about 4 years old, and I liked to dress up. I liked to put on fancy scarves and the makeup, and it was all something that we could do together. I never sensed that what my father or any one of his friends were doing was weird until I became older and became more aware of what normal families look like and what normal men and normal women did.
BIANCULLI: Alysia Abbott speaking to Terry Gross in 2013. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. Let's return to Terry's 2013 interview with Alysia Abbott, author of the memoir "Fairyland." It tells of her being raised by her gay father in San Francisco in the 1970s and '80s, and it's recently been adapted into a film, also called "Fairyland," produced by Sofia Coppola.
(SOUNDBITE OR ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
GROSS: Your father was a writer and editor. He founded a small literary magazine called Soup. He had very little money, but your grandparents, your mother's parents, were helping to pay for the private school that you went to. I don't want to say, again, you know, that this is an era we're talking about, you know, the '70s here. This is the era before the gay marriage movement. It was the era before so many gay people were actively, you know, trying to become parents or had already become parents. And your father was part of this, you know, gay men's community in San Francisco in the Castro and Haight-Ashbury that was - it wasn't about marriage. It wasn't about having children. But your father had a child. He had you.
And so you were like a real anomaly...
ABBOTT: Yeah.
GROSS: ...Within that community that your father was part of. How old were you when you started realizing that you were something really different in this community?
ABBOTT: Well, I think from a young age, I realized I was something different in this community because it was a community of, you know, young men, and here I was a little girl. So I didn't see other little girls around. So I was always - felt different. But from an early age, I sort of liked this difference. That meant I could get all the attention. There was no one like me, and I felt sort of special in a way.
But I think on one level as a straight child of a gay parent, I always felt like a little too straight for the gay community but also a little too gay for the straight community. So I think I felt a little bit ill at ease in either world.
GROSS: Talk a little bit more about feeling too straight for the gay community. Do you think anybody was hoping that you'd be - anybody in your father's circle or your father himself had hoped in any way that you'd be gay, that you'd be a lesbian?
ABBOTT: Oh no, absolutely not. I mean I think because there were so few gay parents that we knew, that just my presence in certain situations - you know, I was a little too straight for the gay community, meaning not that my sexuality was too straight - I was a little girl - but that my presence was reminding people of the world of sort of traditional family structure and responsibility that some people were trying to escape from. You know, I think in my dad's journals he wrote that, you know, children were sort of the ultimate freak-out for gay men that he knew.
GROSS: I have the quote right here. Let me read it. You father wrote in his journal about you. (Reading) F*****s find her cute but are afraid of her. Child equals responsibility, the ultimate freak-out for the selfish and the escapist.
And that makes me think your father felt between two worlds. Like, he was part of and wanted to be part of the gay community, but at the same time he was a father, and he had responsibilities that kind of removed him from the community as it was at that time in the '70s.
ABBOTT: Absolutely. He - in some of his writing, he wrote about how growing up he felt like, you know, the only gay boy in Nebraska, and now he felt like the only gay father in San Francisco. And so that - you know, it made him feel a little isolated. It didn't give him as much freedom to go out. For a while I think he would have us living with roommates 'cause it was a way for him to get free access to babysitting so he could sometimes go out. I mean if he lived by himself with me, he'd never be able to go out at all. And I also think you can't overestimate just how exciting it was to be openly gay in San Francisco in the 1970s. I mean Stonewall was just in 19 - had happened in 1969. Gay civil rights legislation was passing in different states. And, you know, for the first time, you could love openly and not be considered sick, not be arrested. It was a very exciting, heady time, and naturally, you know, my father would want to take part in that.
GROSS: How did he deal with the responsibility of taking care of you when he wanted to, say, go out at night? 'Cause he was a single parent.
ABBOTT: Well, like I said, he had roommates - we had roommates that would be stand-ins as babysitters. And so sometimes he would leave me with roommates so he could go out. Sometimes he would take me out. I mean if it was a poetry reading, he would take me out with him, and if it was on a school night he would just let me fall asleep on a pillow in the corner and then take me home afterwards. So I guess the benefit of the situation was I was - in the end, ended up being very integrated into his creative life because I had to tag along to so many of his creative outings. He would eventually push me onstage to recite a poem, or if I was bored and making drawings while he was engaged in publishing work, he would take some of my drawings and illustrate his poems with them.
GROSS: Did you ever find yourself, say, at a transgressive literary event being utterly bored?
(LAUGHTER)
ABBOTT: Yeah. I mean I think for me, and especially as I got older, I just was like, oh, these people are so weird, and I - you know, I had sort of a distaste for it. Like I - you know, it's so funny because people who are afraid of, you know, gay marriage or gay-headed households are worried somehow that children will be perverted by what they're exposed to, but if anything, everything that I was exposed to just made me more puritanical. Like, I just sort of had a - on some level, like, a desire for normalcy. I was like OK, I've seen that transgressive, you know, weird thing. It's just a little too weird for me. I'm not interested in that.
GROSS: What did you see?
ABBOTT: Oh. Well, I mean, I think back and I think of some of the - you know, I guess some of the exciting things that I got to see, going with my father to Europe for the first time. I went to a poetry festival in Amsterdam and I got to, you know, see Nina Hagen perform onstage. She was a punk rocker at the time, and that was extremely exciting to me at 12 years old. Or I met the poet Richard Brautigan and spent and inordinate amount of time with him, to the point where he was sort of telling me stories about how to watch out for herpes. And you know, that's not exactly appropriate, and I think at the time I was like 12 years old, but it was interesting, and I stuck around.
GROSS: What was your childhood understanding of what it meant to be gay?
ABBOTT: Well, it meant to be attracted to someone of the same sex. I mean when I was - I think it's funny because my father would write about - I think he was really amused by my perception as a child. So he would often write down conversations we had and things. And I think I was with my father in Nebraska and visiting my grandparents - his parents - in Nebraska, and I turned to my grandfather and asked him, what does it mean to be gay?And my grandfather said, oh, that means to be happy. And I said, that's not what my dad says. And, you know, of course, my dad thought that was very funny. So I was very curious about it.
But, you know, I do recall also my father writing in his journal that at one point, as he was getting ready for a date, I said to him, I don't understand why you have to like boys. You know, why can't you like girls? When I grow up, I'm going to like boys. And I think in that - you know, at that point I was watching a lot of television, like "Happy Days" and stuff, and you know, I wanted to take part in this, you know, ritualization of romance that was boy-girl. It wasn't boy-boy. It wasn't girl-girl. It was boy-girl. And I - you know, I also had a very strong longing for a mother. And so I think I had a fantasy that if my father had a girlfriend, that I might get a mother, and then if I got a mother, I might get brothers and sisters.
GROSS: Your father was out. I mean, he came out after Stonewall. And so he was out. He had no problem with that. But as you got a little bit older, your father's gayness became kind of an embarrassment to you. And one of the moments that really broke my heart reading your book - you know, your father's going out, and - you know, out at night, and he says to you, how do I look? And you say - 'cause you're kind of embarrassed at this point by his, you know, open homosexuality, and you say to him, you look so queer. And he's of course really hurt by that.
And I understand you wanting to fit in with your friends and be, quote, you know, "normal," fitting in with your friends and their families. But I also figured, oh, your father must have been so hurt, and especially - this is like post-Stonewall and in the gay liberation era, and his own daughter is embarrassed by him. When you were reading your father's journals and seeing his life from his point of view, as opposed to seeing it from your point of view, what kind of, like, shift in perspective did that give you about your childhood?
ABBOTT: Well, a pretty powerful shift in perspective. As I was a child, like any child, I saw everything through sort of the lens of myself and whether I was getting my needs met or not and whether my dad was being fair or unfair or exposing me to, you know, ridicule or not. And unfortunately, he died just as I was becoming an adult. He just, he died four days before my 22nd birthday. And, you know, I think to be revisiting the journals now, 20 years later, as a parent of two children, I have so much more sympathy for his struggles, and respect.
The fact that he was a single father living among roommates, trying to find love as an openly gay man and also trying to make a name for himself as a writer, and that he was able to do that, you know, just gives me tremendous amount of respect for the struggle he went through that I couldn't have appreciated at that age - you know, nor should I. I mean I think that kids should be protected from all of their parent - you know, they don't need to hear all of their parents' trials. They want to be able to enjoy their childhood. But I was able to revisit his journals with a lot more of a sense of forgiveness and sympathy, really.
BIANCULLI: Alysia Abbott speaking to Terry Gross in 2013. After a break, we'll continue their conversation, and critic-at-large John Powers reviews the new movie "Blue Moon," starring Ethan Hawke. I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. Let's continue with Terry's 2013 interview with Alysia Abbott. Her memoir "Fairyland" has been adapted into a film, also called "Fairyland," produced by Sofia Coppola. The memoir is about being raised by a single gay father in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in the 1970s and '80s. There were few openly gay single fathers back then. Abbott's father identified as bisexual back in 1969, when he married the woman who became Alysia's mother. When Alysia was 2, her mother was killed in a car accident and Alysia and her father moved from Atlanta to San Francisco.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
GROSS: For several years, you spent some of your summers with your mother's parents in - was it Illinois?
ABBOTT: Yes.
GROSS: And my impression is that they were, you know, middle-class suburban family - which was a very different life than the life you were leading with your father 'cause he was, you know, he was like your struggling artist type who didn't have much money, and it was a kind of very bohemian life. What were, though, some of the things that you liked and didn't like about the more conventional lives your grandparents had and the more conventional life you led when you were with them?
ABBOTT: Well, I would get very excited as summer approached and I knew I was going to my grandparents. I loved the sense of comfort and space that their world offered me. It was a completely different world than what I knew with my father. So my father and I would be living in an urban center in San Francisco in an apartment. But, you know, he wasn't the cleanest. He wasn't the best housekeeper. There wasn't always a well-stocked fridge. Things didn't always work. Our car was eventually towed when he stopped paying parking tickets on it.
And here I would come to my grandparents every summer, and they would pick me up in this beautiful Lincoln Town Car with windows that would go up and down with the push of a button. And the house was very clean and smelled clean. And there was TV in every room, and delicious food, and I could go to the swimming pool whenever I wanted. But at the same time, when I was at my grandparents, I sometimes dearly missed my father. I felt there was something unique in our family in that it was just the two of us. And so I felt that I had sort of the unadulterated, you know, love - that I was his sole focus and he was my sole focus. And I loved that.
And at my grandparents, I had an aunt and uncle who would come with their kids, and we had to kind of negotiate our plans or, you know, I wasn't the single target of attention and affection. And furthermore, when I did go to my grandparents, my father was not present. And it wasn't just a matter of him not attending those visits with me. And, you know, frankly, to go from San Francisco to rural Illinois, you know, maybe he would have preferred to stay in San Francisco. But he also - he wasn't pictured anywhere and he wasn't asked after. And my mother as well, because she died in a tragic car accident when she was only 27, she wasn't pictured and we didn't talk about her. It seemed there was something in the story of my parents that was a little unpalatable.
GROSS: Let's talk a little bit about how AIDS affected your life and the world that you lived in. You write how when the AIDS epidemic hit San Francisco - and you were still living with your father then - people started disappearing, the neighborhood started changing. You were living then in Haight-Ashbury or the Castro?
ABBOTT: Living in Haight-Ashbury.
GROSS: And your father tested positive for HIV in 1986. So can you describe a little bit how your world started to change when the AIDS epidemic hit?
ABBOTT: Well, I don't recall when my father tested HIV-positive. Actually, I learned that date, 1986, in reading his journals. I think, at the time, I was aware as anyone reading newspapers and watching television was of the AIDS epidemic, and I was scared. I was scared because I knew my father was gay and that made him more vulnerable. And that made me scared to talk, you know, to be open about my father's sexuality because being gay in that era was so closely aligned with this fatal, disturbing disease. And so I think I had a lot of fear around it generally.
But before I left to college, my senior year in high school, a close friend of ours died of AIDS. And he had been - I had gotten to know a lot of people in our neighborhood in the Haight and I got to know a lot of my dad's friends. But this particular friend I became very close with and had a crush on, and he went to my birthday party and even bought liquor for my friends and I once when I was a teenager. It hit me when he died. I never got to say goodbye to him.
Like a lot of men, young men - he was only 31 - like a lot of young men in the city, he didn't want to share his decline with very many people. He basically went into hiding, didn't tell anyone about it, other than his lover and his roommate. And so my father had heard he was sick, and I had suggested we go visit him, but we never did. And time passed, and I really didn't know what was going on until my father got a call that he had died. And my freshman year at college, I wrote an essay about him and as well about the homophobia that I had seen.
At the time in San Francisco, when the AIDS epidemic was hitting very hard, some men would be targeted in the city for violence, and there would be antigay graffiti scrawled on walls or on the back of bus seats. And this affected me. And so I wrote about all of this in this essay about how, because of Sam, I was now going to stand up against homophobia and I would, you know, defend gay men. But in this essay, I never even write that my father is gay, and I never even wrote, you know, that he might be HIV-positive, which at the time he was. So I was aware of what was going on, but I think that I probably had a lot of denial or fear about how the AIDS epidemic was going to hit me at home.
GROSS: When you were in your early 20s and living and working in Paris and you became aware that your father was getting very sick with AIDS, you got a letter in which he described the progression of his illness, and then you wrote back to him. And I have to tell you, I just - I found your letter back to your father just kind of upsetting (laughter).
ABBOTT: Oh, no.
GROSS: Yeah, I'll read you the excerpt and we'll talk. You wrote, (reading) Dear Dad, I received your letter yesterday. Sometimes, reading a letter from you can be depressing. You complain so much about your bad health and ill luck. I'm not asking you to censor those aspects of your life, but if you accentuate less the negative, I would enjoy your letters more.
And I'm thinking, gosh, your father is, like, dying of AIDS and you're complaining that he complains too much about his bad health. And, you know, he has no family except for you, and you're in Paris.
ABBOTT: Actually, I was in New York when that letter was written.
GROSS: Thank you for correcting me.
ABBOTT: Sorry to correct you.
GROSS: OK. It seems like a very uncharitable letter. So tell me what was going through your mind when you wrote it, if you remember.
ABBOTT: Yeah.
GROSS: I hope you don't mind me saying that. I'm sure you understand what I'm saying (laughter).
ABBOTT: No, it's OK. I mean, I've grappled with these feelings, too. I mean, a part of the experience of writing a memoir is to confront earlier versions of yourself and versions of yourself that, you know, you can be critical of and say, how could I do that? But I know at the time, I wasn't fully able to absorb or be aware of what he was going through. I had yet to live with him with AIDS. So I had moved away to college in 1988, and then he had started to manifest full-blown AIDS in 1991, which is approximately the time he wrote the letter. And so in a lot of the earlier letters he wrote me, I would describe my sadness or fears about him becoming sick, and he would sort of downplay them and say, well, there's no reason to cry before I die, and we're all going to die one day.
And he would - often, the letters would be taken up with, you know, funny anecdotes. He didn't really dwell too much on his health. And so I think I let myself believe that he really wasn't that sick or he could still have a long time to go. And when he came out to Paris to ask me to move home, I was really blindsided and I was upset. I mean, I was upset that my life as I knew it was ending, even though it really wasn't. His life was ending. My life was just beginning. But from the perspective of a 20-year-old, I felt that I was going to have to give up everything and go home and take care of him, and my life would be subsumed by illness and death. And I was really afraid of that.
BIANCULLI: Alysia Abbott speaking to Terry Gross in 2013. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. Let's return to Terry's 2013 interview with Alysia Abbott, author of the memoir "Fairyland." It tells of her being raised by her gay father in San Francisco in the 1970s and '80s. Her book has been adapted into a movie, also called "Fairyland," produced by Sofia Coppola.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
GROSS: Your father had, you know, earlier had some drug problems. He went to Narcotics Anonymous. He gave up drugs. He started meditating at a neighborhood Zendo, a Zen center, in the Castro and became very committed to Buddhism. And when he was dying, like, at the end - this is after you'd come home to take care of him. He spent the last few weeks of his life at a hospice for men dying of AIDS that was next door to this Zen center. And it was created by the men who ran the Zen center. And you were his only family, so you were with him at the end. And he had friends who were there, too. And I'm just kind of wondering about the experience of being, like, the only, you know, blood relative who was there for him at the end, but knowing that he had, you know, he had dear friends who were there, too.
ABBOTT: I mean, I felt like it was a privileged position. You know, growing up, I always felt we had this privileged relationship that, you know, somehow, I was No. 1 in his heart, and he was No. 1 in my heart. And it was almost a romantic idea for me, which helped me get through the difficulties I had of growing up motherless and in the situation we were in. And so on one level, it was very hard for me to be nursing for my father and making end-of-life decisions with him without the help of another family member or just dealing with the day-to-day of a dying person.
But on another level, I liked having that all to myself. There were friends who could come in and help. But, you know, in the hierarchy, I was the daughter. It was a privileged place to be. And at his funeral, you know, I was able to make a lot of the choices about what would be read, in what order, what pictures would be put up. And I felt being able to do that was a way of being close with him. And, you know, it was sort of an expression of our intimacy, I guess.
GROSS: How did you find your father's journals? Did he leave them for you to read?
ABBOTT: He didn't leave them with a big sign saying read this, but he didn't burn them. He didn't destroy them when he knew he was sick. Basically, I was clearing out our apartment in Haight-Ashbury because I was - I wanted to move and was in the closet digging through boxes of stuff and found a huge stack of journals which I'd never seen before. So I was always aware he kept journals when I was a little girl. But I had never seen the journals from when he was with my mother. And at that moment that I found those journals, I read about my mother's death for the first time. And, you know, that was quite intense for me, you know, especially because I was reading all of this without having him around to ask questions of. So I had to sort of make sense of it on my own.
GROSS: You know, a lot of your memoir is based on your father's journals and on letters he wrote. And my impression reading your book was that he had meant, he had intended those journals to be read by you at some point, so that you would understand more of who your father was. Did you feel at ease reading them, like it is what he would've wanted?
ABBOTT: Yes, I was of two minds about reading the journals. On one level, I felt like, you know, journals are private and they're personal. And you write things in a journal that you don't say to your closest loved ones. And there was part of me that felt like I should respect his privacy. But then there was also another part of me that felt like, A, we had been through so much together - meaning, I cared for him as he was dying of AIDS in the last year of his life. And, you know, that's a very intimate transaction, very intimate relationship. I didn't feel like there was anything new that I would discover. Or I felt that this was, you know, an extenuation of our intimacy. And then B, I found actually in one of his journals, he wondered who he was writing for. And he said, maybe for Alysia, that she might one day know where her parents were at.
And so when I found the journals, I really saw them as a gift from him in terms of, they allow me a way to understand what he was up against, what he was struggling with. He records things in our life together that I would otherwise have no access to, because when you are raised by a single parent without any siblings, who do you have to share memories with? You know, that person dies. And, you know, then you just have the memories in your own head. And you can't sort of verify things. And as I was working on the memoir, again and again, I could come across episodes and be like, yeah, I remember that. And then I could get more detail from my father. And so it was like a reflection of myself and our life together.
GROSS: Well, Alysia Abbott, I want to thank you so much for talking with us. I really appreciate it. And I'm glad you wrote the book.
ABBOTT: Thank you so much, Terry. It was really great to be on the show.
BIANCULLI: Alysia Abbott speaking to Terry Gross in 2013. Her memoir, "Fairyland," has been adapted into a movie starring Scoot McNairy and Emilia Jones and produced by Sofia Coppola. Coming up, critic-at-large John Powers reviews "Blue Moon," a new film directed by Richard Linklater and starring Ethan Hawke and Margaret Qualley. This is FRESH AIR.
DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. In the new movie "Blue Moon," Ethan Hawke stars as lyricist Lorenz Hart on the night his former writing partner, Richard Rodgers, scores his greatest hit with the musical "Oklahoma!" The film is directed by Richard Linklater and costars Andrew Scott and Margaret Qualley. It opens this week in selected theaters and then goes wide. Our critic-at-large John Powers says it's a smart, funny and touching portrait of a genius on the sly.
JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: Artists spend their lives trying to create things that express their own personal vision. Yet, it's one of art's cruelties that the distinctive vision that makes you special today can almost overnight make you passe. This hard truth runs through Richard Linklater's aching comedy "Blue Moon," which stars Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart, the genius lyricist famous between the two world wars for his witty pyrotechnics. Along with composer Richard Rodgers, Hart wrote over two dozen musicals and turned out hundreds of songs, many of them still standards. "Isn't It Romantic?" "My Funny Valentine," "Bewitched, Bothered And Bewildered" and, yes, "Blue Moon."
For all the acclaim, however, Hart was painfully insecure, a raw nerve end of a man. Closeted and Jewish, he was 5 feet tall, thought himself unattractive and had erratic, alcohol-drenched work habits that eventually sank his partnership with Rodgers. It's this damaged Hart, 47 years old and only months from death, whose soul is laid grippingly bare in Linklater's film. The action is set over a few hours of March 31, 1943, the night of the Broadway premiere of "Oklahoma!" Rodgers' first musical with his new writing partner, Oscar Hammerstein II. Hart walks out in the middle. He hates the show for being sentimental and rife with bogus Americana. He even hates the exclamation point after Oklahoma.
But he also knows it's going to be epochal, bigger than anything he and Rodgers ever did. And so, putting on a brave face beneath his unfortunate comb-over, Larry, as everyone calls him, goes to Sardi's restaurant, where "Oklahoma!" will have its after-party. He intends to nobly congratulate Rodgers, the partner who jilted him, but also to meet up with his protege, Elizabeth Weiland, a 20-year-old Yale drama student played by Margaret Qualley, with whom he dreams of sharing a grand love. As Larry waits, he starts getting sozzled, tossing off urbane, opinionated, baroquely droll patter to the bartender. That's a wry Bobby Cannavale. And to a sympathetic fellow drinker, New Yorker writer E.B. White, played by Patrick Kennedy.
While Larry can be a buoyant delight, you can sense he'd be a nightmare to work with. This becomes even clearer when he finally talks with his longtime partner, played with effortless mastery by Andrew Scott. Dapper in his tux and high on success, Rodgers treats the somewhat rumpled heart with a shifting blend of generosity, respect, sadness and the desire just to get on with things. But Larry can't stop himself from going too far. Here, he says they should do a new show together, but one that's not too easy. Rodgers responds with smiling umbrage.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BLUE MOON")
ANDREW SCOTT: (As Richard Rodgers) "Oklahoma!" is too easy? The guy actually getting the girl in the end is too easy? You've just eliminated every successful musical comedy ever written, Larry.
ETHAN HAWKE: (As Lorenz Hart) It's too easy for me.
SCOTT: (As Richard Rodgers) Did you hear the audience tonight?
HAWKE: (As Lorenz Hart) Yes.
SCOTT: (As Richard Rodgers) Sixteen hundred people didn't think it was too easy. You're telling me 1,600 people were wrong?
HAWKE: (As Lorenz Hart) I'm just saying you and I can do something so much more emotionally complicated. We don't have to pander to what...
SCOTT: (As Richard Rodgers) Oscar and I are pandering?
HAWKE: (As Lorenz Hart) No, I didn't say that.
SCOTT: (As Richard Rodgers) Irving Berlin is pandering?
HAWKE: (As Lorenz Hart) I love Berlin.
SCOTT: (As Richard Rodgers) "White Christmas" is pandering?
HAWKE: (As Lorenz Hart) Well, I don't believe "White Christmas."
SCOTT: (As Richard Rodgers) OK.
(LAUGHTER)
SCOTT: (As Richard Rodgers) Well, maybe audiences have changed.
HAWKE: (As Lorenz Hart) Well, they still love to laugh.
SCOTT: (As Richard Rodgers) They want to laugh, but not in that way.
HAWKE: (As Lorenz Hart) In what way?
SCOTT: (As Richard Rodgers) In your way. They want to laugh, but they also want to cry a little. They want to feel.
POWERS: In his real life, of course, Larry is actually a cauldron of feelings. But in his art, he likes to disguise them. The canny Rodgers appreciates that Hart's sophisticated lyrics modernized American songwriting. But he realizes that such cleverness is no longer in fashion. Now, with its confined setting and garrulous characters, "Blue Moon" often feels like an adapted play. Yet this isn't a problem. Linklater understands how to use his camera in confined spaces to keep a talkie movie visually arresting. And he's helped by the snap of Robert Kaplow's screenplay and by an immaculate cast that nails every line.
Hawke transforms himself in body and voice, turning his familiar cocky self into a physically shrinking figure, forever tiptoeing on the rim of despair. His neediness is naked when Elizabeth arrives and they share a warm, funny tete-a-tete, in which she tells him about her sexual encounter with the big man on campus she's always adored. Qualley, it's worth saying, is just terrific here, bursting with charm and vitality. Kidding himself into thinking this lanky young beauty might be romantically interested in him, Larry listens to her with the rapt attention of one who hopes to wish love into existence, just as earlier he'd hoped to wish back into existence his old easy rapport with Rodgers.
Although "Blue Moon" works on a small canvas, Linklater uses it to explore big things - shifting cultural tastes, professional jealousy, the vagaries of artistic collaboration, the weight of passing time. And he gives us an indelible portrait of a man who, for all his uncommon self-devouring brilliance, is driven by feelings that are all too human. Larry is lonely and frightened and looking for love, just like the rest of us.
BIANCULLI: John Powers reviewed the new movie "Blue Moon."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BLUE MOON")
BILLIE HOLIDAY: (Singing) Blue moon, you saw me standing alone without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own. Blue moon, you knew just what I was there for. You heard me saying a prayer for someone I really could care for. And then they suddenly appeared before me, the only one my arms will ever hold. I heard somebody whisper, please, adore me. And when I looked, the moon had turned to gold. Blue Moon, now I'm no longer alone without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own.
BIANCULLI: On Monday's show, Ken Burns talks about his new PBS documentary series on the Revolutionary War. It includes the perspectives of women, Native Americans and enslaved and free Black people, the people excluded from the declaration all men are created equal. We'll talk about how that war, which he says was also civil war, echoes today. I hope you can join us.
FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Sam Briger is our managing producer. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Herzfeld and Diana Martinez. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Hope Wilson is our consulting visual producer. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BLUE MOON")
HOLIDAY: (Singing) Blue moon, you saw me standing alone without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own. Blue moon, you knew just what I was there for. You heard me saying a prayer for someone I really could care for. And then they suddenly appeared before me, the only one my arms will ever hold.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.