#167 Fairyland: A Transcendent Father–Daughter Story Finds New Life in Film with Alysia Abbott

Queer history is family history, and Alysia Abbott's Fairyland proves how one father-daughter story can illuminate an entire era. In this conversation, Estelle Erasmus talks with Alysia about her acclaimed memoir of growing up with her single gay father in 1970s and 80s San Francisco, and how that memoir found new life as a feature film more than a decade later. In this discussion, they explore the love, art, grief, and legacy at the heart of the story.

Alysia shares how her father built a queer literary community long before the internet, and how his journals, letters, poems, and comics helped her reconstruct their world on the page. Together, Estelle and Alysia explore the craft, history, and emotional truth that shaped both the memoir and its cinematic adaptation.

In this episode:

• Writing memoir from a daughter's perspective inside a queer community shaped by AIDS and activism [4:12]

• Showing how Fairyland bridges counterculture and mainstream culture, bringing a once marginalized father-daughter story into national conversation [6:03]

• Exploring how memoir can serve a higher purpose by honoring a life, a community, and a legacy that might otherwise be lost [23:53]

• Capturing the cultural touchstones, from poetry readings to Pride to the queer arts scene, that defined a transformative era [25:33]

• Using journals, letters, interviews, and research to rebuild a vivid sense of time, place, and character [28:57]

• Navigating the leap from book to film while remaining a trusted collaborator rather than an obstacle [33:44]

• Crafting an ending that situates one family's story inside a larger shared queer history [41:47]

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/sIyYiDxaGP8

About Alysia

Alysia Abbott is the author of Fairyland, A Memoir of My Father, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a winner of the ALA Stonewall Award and the Madame Figaro Prix Heroine. The feature film based on her memoir, directed by Andrew Durham and produced by Sofia Coppola, premiered at the Sundance Festival in 2022, played in theaters across the country last month, and is now streaming on major platforms. Her essays and reviews have been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, WBUR's Cognoscenti, Vogue and elsewhere. She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Ragdale and the Virginia Center for the Arts. She currently teaches literature and memoir at Emerson College and MIT.

Connect with Alysia: http://www.alysiaabbott.com/

Stream Fairyland here: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/fairyland

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About Estelle Estelle Erasmus is an award-winning journalist,TEDx Speaker, author of Writing That Gets Noticed, and host of Freelance Writing Direct. A contributing editor for Writer's Digest and adjunct professor at NYU, her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, WIRED, PBS/Next Avenue, The Independent, and AARP The Magazine. She has served as editor-in-chief of five national magazines.

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