I am a storyteller, a radio producer, and a psychotherapist. My thirty years as a therapist enabled me to witness the healing that comes from exploring our stories and family history. My clients’ courage inspired me to write my own story. My mother-daughter story explores the interplay of the personal with social movements. In the 1950s, my family was devastated by homophobia and conversion therapy. I am profoundly grateful for the women’s and gay liberation movements of the 1970s, which transformed our lives. Both my mother and I were able to recover from trauma and come to joy, connection, and activism.
I had loved Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson’s powerful, fictionalized version of her childhood as a queer child adopted into a Pentecostal family. For me, the intense potency of Winterson’s memoir grew as I read. She stoically copes in childhood with her adopted mother’s ongoing abuse and rejection, locking her for hours in the coal bin or out on the doorstep. At sixteen, Winterson is forced to leave home because of being in love with a woman. In adulthood, her childhood trauma catches up with her as she sinks into profound depression and a kind of madness. Her journey, both to find her birth mother and to heal into mental health, make this memoir unforgettable.
The shocking, heart-breaking - and often very funny - true story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published. It was Jeanette's version of the story of a terraced house in Accrington, an adopted child, and the thwarted giantess Mrs Winterson. It was a cover story, a painful past written over and repainted. It was a story of survival.
This book is that story's the silent twin. It is full of hurt and humour and a fierce love of life. It is about the pursuit of happiness,…
I was drawn to this graphic memoir because, like me, Bechel grew up with a closeted parent in a heterosexual marriage while being a queer child herself. Like my memoir, Fun Home is also a coming-out story. Her art beautifully details the complexities of family life with both humor and gravitas. Some of the humor involves dead bodies, as her family runs a funeral home. Yet Bechdel must also grapple with profound loss: just after she comes out to her father, he dies by suicide, walking in front of a truck. She wonders if she can infer that he was a tragic victim of homophobia, but tells herself that’s too simplified an answer. This memoir is rich, complex, and riveting.
DISCOVER the BESTSELLING GRAPHIC MEMOIR behind the Olivier Award nominated musical.
'A sapphic graphic treat' The Times
A moving and darkly humorous family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Alison Bechdel's gothic drawings. If you liked Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis you'll love this.
Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high-school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and the family babysitter. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is…
This stunning memoir by the poet Audre Lorde chronicles her childhood in Harlem in the 1930s and 40s, the daughter of black West Indian immigrants, and her young adulthood. I was intrigued to learn about Lorde’s life as an out lesbian in the 1950s, curious to know what that life was like in the generation before mine. So little about the life of gay forbears has been available, creating an acute longing in me to know more. Zami’s narrative weaves through the women in Lorde’s life: her mother, sisters, high school friends, and many lovers, creating a web of who and what sustained as well as challenged her. Lorde invented a new form she dubbed “biomythography” that combines history, biography, and myth. That combination is gripping and poetic.
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive
A little black girl opens her eyes in 1930s Harlem, weak and half-blind. On she stumbles - through teenage pain and loneliness, but then to happiness in friendship, work and sex, from Washington Heights to Mexico, always changing, always strong. This is Audre Lorde's story. A rapturous, life-affirming autobiographical novel by the 'Black, lesbian, mother, warrior poet', it changed the literary landscape.
Native Country of the Heart is, like my memoir, a mother-daughter story. Queer Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga intertwines her own story with her mother Elvira from childhood onward. Her resilient mother had a rough life, starting with being hired out as a child by her dad to pick cotton in the California fields. I learned so much about Chicano culture and the Mexican diaspora that we never get in school. One stunning fact: when Dust Bowl survivors came to California, two million Mexicans were repatriated to Mexico to let the white immigrants work the same fields. Moraga beautifully layers her personal story with cultural insights and reflection. I was very moved by Moraga’s grief during the slow loss of Elvira to dementia and her death from Alzheimer's.
Native Country of the Heart: A Mexican American Geography is, at its core, a mother-daughter story. The mother, Elvira, was hired out as a child by her own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley. The daughter, Cherrie L. Moraga, is a brilliant, pioneering, queer Latina feminist. The story of these two women, and of their people, is woven together in an intimate memoir of critical reflection and deep personal revelation.
As a young woman, Elvira left California to work as a cigarette girl in glamorous late-1920s Tijuana, where an ambiguous relationship with a wealthy white man taught her…
This story interested me because I was curious about what it was like to grow up with an out gay parent. When Alysia was two, her mom died, and her father moved with her to San Francisco. For better and worse, she was raised amidst San Francisco’s vibrant gay male scene of the 1970s and 80s. I related to her struggles as a child with the need to fit in. At the same time, her dad introduced her to the creative world of writers and artists, enriching her life. In the 80s, tragedy struck, as gay men in their community died of AIDS in epidemic numbers. After she left home, her father called her to come back when he was dying of AIDS. Her writing is honest and doesn’t simplify.
In this vibrant memoir, Alysia Abbott recounts growing up in 1970s San Francisco with Steve Abbott, a gay, single father during an era when that was rare. Reconstructing their time together from a remarkable cache of Steve's writings, Alysia gives us an unforgettable portrait of a tumultuous, historic period in San Francisco as well as an exquisitely moving account of a father's legacy and a daughter's love.
When I was seven, my mother attempted suicide and was taken away to a mental hospital for electroshock treatments. Riding Fury Home tells the story of the intense, complicated bond between my mother and myself, from growing up in the 1950s as her caretaker, to discovering in adulthood that she had been a closeted lesbian given psychiatric treatment to “cure her,” to our shared exhilaration in the 1970s when we both come out as lesbians.
The memoir traces the profound ways in which our two lives were impacted by the social landscape of our time. Riding Fury Home is a shattering account of our family’s struggle against homophobia and mental illness, and a powerful story of healing, forgiveness, and redemption.
Bright but unassuming Marilyn Jones has some grown-up decisions to make, especially after Mama goes to prison for drugs and larceny. With no one to take care of them, Marilyn and her younger, mentally challenged brother, Carol, get tossed into the foster care system. While shuffling from one home to another, Marilyn makes it her mission to find the Tan Man, a mysterious man from her babyhood she believes holds the key to her family’s happiness.
But Marilyn’s quest is halted when her daddy, an ex-con she has never met, is chosen by…
Bright but unassuming Marilyn Jones has some grown-up decisions to make, especially after Mama goes to prison for drugs and larceny. With no one to take care of them, Marilyn and her younger, mentally challenged brother, Carol, get tossed into the foster care system. While shuffling from one home to another, Marilyn makes it her mission to find the Tan Man, a mysterious man from her babyhood she believes holds the key to her family's happiness.
But Marilyn's quest is halted when her daddy, an ex-con she has never met, is chosen by the courts as the new guardian. Caleb…
