Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter: Growing Up with a Gay Dad
Written by Alison Wearing
Narrated by Alison Wearing
4.5/5
()
About this audiobook
NATIONAL BESTSELLER (The Globe and Mail)
Finalist for the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction (2014)
Longlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize (2014)
A moving memoir about growing up with a gay father in the 1980s, and a tribute to the power of truth, humour, acceptance and familial love.
Alison Wearing led a largely carefree childhood until she learned, at the age of 12, that her family was a little more complex than she had realized. Sure her father had always been unusual compared to the other dads in the neighbourhood: he loved to bake croissants, wear silk pyjamas around the house, and skip down the street singing songs from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. But when he came out of the closet in the 1970s, when homosexuality was still a cardinal taboo, it was a shock to everyone in the quiet community of Peterborough, Ontario—especially to his wife and three children.
Alison’s father was a professor of political science and amateur choral conductor, her mother was an accomplished pianist and marathon runner, and together they had fed the family a steady diet of arts, adventures, mishaps, normal frustrations and inexhaustible laughter. Yet despite these agreeable circumstances, Joe’s internal life was haunted by conflicting desires. As he began to explore and understand the truth about himself, he became determined to find a way to live both as a gay man and also a devoted father, something almost unheard of at the time. Through extraordinary excerpts from his own letters and journals from the years of his coming out, we read of Joe’s private struggle to make sense and beauty of his life, to take inspiration from an evolving society and become part of the vanguard of the gay revolution in Canada.
Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter is also the story of “coming out” as the daughter of a gay father. Already wrestling with an adolescent’s search for identity when her father came out of the closet, Alison promptly “went in,” concealing his sexual orientation from her friends and spinning extravagant stories about all of the “great straight things” they did together. Over time, Alison came to see that life with her father was surprisingly interesting and entertaining, even oddly inspiring, and in fact, there was nothing to hide.
Balancing intimacy, history and downright hilarity, Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter is a captivating tale of family life: deliciously imperfect, riotously challenging, and full of life’s great lessons in love. Alison brings her story to life with a skillfully light touch in this warm, heartfelt and revelatory memoir.
Bespeak Audio Editions brings Canadian voices to the world with audiobook editions of some of the country’s greatest works of literature, performed by Canadian actors.
Alison Wearing
Alison Wearing is a journalist and travel writer. She lives in Canada, where she has received the National Magazine Award and the Western Canada Magazine Award. Honeymoon in Purdah is her first book.
Related to Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter
Related audiobooks
Logical Family: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Escape Artist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThalia Book Club: Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPaper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Missed Translations: Meeting the Immigrant Parents Who Raised Me Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Moments of Glad Grace: A Memoir Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Shooting Out the Lights: A Memoir Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Making Toast: A Family Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Year by the Sea: Thoughts of an Unfinished Woman Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm the One Who Got Away: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Name All the Animals: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tragedy Plus Time: A Tragi-comic Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Chanel Bonfire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lie: A Memoir of Two Marriages, Catfishing & Coming Out Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Heart of Glass Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Ladysitting: My Year with Nana at the End of Her Century Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother Daughter Story Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Something Rising (Light and Swift) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Like Crazy: Life with My Mother and Her Invisible Friends Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Any Kind of Luck at All: A memoir Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Glass Eye: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hiding My Candy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Amen, Amen, Amen: Memoir of a Girl Who Couldn't Stop Praying (Among Other Things) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When You Lie about Your Age, the Terrorists Win: Reflections on Looking in the Mirror Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5My Long Trip Home: A Family Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Devotion: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Personal Memoirs For You
Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm Glad My Mom Died Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Counting the Cost Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Glass Castle: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Finding Me: A Memoir Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Roxane Gay & Everand Originals: My Year of Psychedelics: Lessons on Better Living Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Woman in Me Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Year of Magical Thinking Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How Y'all Doing?: Misadventures and Mischief from a Life Well Lived Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wishful Drinking Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Enough Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Summer of Fall: Gravity is a bitch, but I'm still standing Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Angela's Ashes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Making It So: A Memoir Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bad Mormon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Night: New translation by Marion Wiesel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Roxane Gay & Everand Originals: Built for This: The Quiet Strength of Powerlifting Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Love, Pamela: A Memoir of Prose, Poetry, and Truth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Good Girls Don't Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Writing into the Wound: Understanding trauma, truth, and language Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5See You on the Way Down: Catch You on the Way Back Up! Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Love, Lucy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5While Time Remains: A North Korean Girl's Search for Freedom in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pageboy: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter
4 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I first read this book in highschool, and I had to see if it held up. It really did. There were some expected "yikes" moments, but all in all it's an excellent story, and an interesting piece of queer history