He was struck by the beauty of the cover photo and intrigued by the title. I was as far away from what I imagine San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury was like in the ’70s and ’80s as one could possibly be when a man named Elliott from Churchill Manitoba leaned over and asked what I was reading.
I was reading Fairyland on the long haul Viarail train from Toronto to Vancouver in the dead of winter. According to the New Yorker, Fairyland doubles as a portrait of a city and a community at a crucial point in history. Named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and one of the best books of 2013 by the San Francisco Chronicle, Alysia Abbott’s debut memoir is about growing up motherless, the only child of gay poet and writer Steve Abbott, during the height of San Francisco’s vibrant cultural ’70s through to the depth of the AIDS crisis of the ’80s. One of literary memoir’s greatest satisfactions-both for writer and reader-is the slow, deliberate making of a story, of making sense, out of randomness and pain.”
In her New Yorker essay “A Memoir is not a Status Update,” Dani Shapiro articulates what every memoirist knows to be true: “Literary memoir is born… of the powerful need to craft a story out of the chaos of one’s own history.
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