Daughters and Fathers: Alysia Abbott and Joan Wickersham in Conversation

Authors Abbott and Wickersham have both written critically acclaimed memoirs about the fathers they loved and lost too soon. In Fairyland, which won an ALA Stonewall Award, Abbott chronicles her Haight-Ashbury upbringing with an openly bisexual father who succumbed to AIDS. Wickersham’s The Suicide Index, a National Book Award finalist, is a wise, moving, and often surprisingly humorous account of how she and her family endured in the aftermath of her gentle, affectionate father’s shocking suicide. The two authors will discuss their memoirs, their writing lives, and their other work. WCAI is a media sponsor for this event.

Alysia Abbott is the author of Fairyland, A Memoir of My Father, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and an ALA Stonewall Award winner and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. She grew up in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the only child of gay poet and writer, Steve Abbott. She holds an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from New School University and was a contributing producer at WNYC Radio. Alysia is also co-founder of The Recollectors Project, dedicated to remembering parents lost to AIDS and supporting the children they left behind. Alysia currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and their two children.