transferring memoir recollects life with homosexual dad

In Ashes to Ink, Lisa Lucca wrote moving memoirs in which she recalls how she came to terms with her gay father. Lucca not only learns to accept who her father is, she also realizes that she and her father loved each other as best they could, despite the problems they had.

Lucca not only shares memories of life with her father, but also writes about her own search for love, which she sometimes sought in the wrong places. She vividly remembers her marriage to a man who did not satisfy her, a man who spent his life on the street and often left her alone with her young son. When she finally made the decision to end this relationship, she was horrified to find that her husband was vicious, vengeful, and didn’t seem to care much about her child. It was a bitter pill to swallow, but Lucca held her head up and did everything possible to make a living and get a good life for herself and her son.

Lucca doesn’t hold back when she writes about her father. She remembers a father who may have loved her lesbian sister more than he loved her. Passages in which she expresses her feelings about this situation are deeply emotional. It must have been a difficult book for her, but Lucca remains open throughout the book. Readers will feel they know the author personally.

She is not afraid to express her feelings about her father’s sometimes confusing behavior. Her father visited her when she lived in San Francisco. She is shocked when he moves to town just two weeks later to live with a man he has just spent a night or two with. But despite everything, whether their relationship is going through a rough patch or not, her love for her father and desire to be loved by him becomes evident.
In an interview, Lucca said that she had heard from readers who had gay parents.

“I’ve heard of others who are younger than me,” she said. “One is straight and the other is gay. In either case, they were less affected by their parents’ coming out, as there was more social acceptance news in the past 15+ years, and their sons had a hard time being teenagers, one of whom disliked his father for months. One gay reader said that as she read the book, she thought more about her family accepting her. “

Lisa Lucca with her father as a child and as a young adult.

Lucca has been writing a diary since her youth. She always knew, ever since her parents divorced and her father came out, that one day she would write about their relationship. Since the book is set in the past few decades, Lucca sometimes uses a language that was the vernacular then, including a language that would no longer be acceptable today. In a brief note at the beginning of the book, Lucca assures her readers that she will in no way condone the use of LGBTQ-hostile slurs. She has not received negative feedback for using this language. In fact, she became friends with Jordan Budd, the executive director of Colage, the national organization for children of lesbian and gay parents.

“We had a really good conversation about it,” she said of Budd. “Those were the words. It was Archie Bunker, that’s how I learned everything about any kind of orientation in Central America in the 1960s, except mom and dad. I haven’t heard anything negative about those words from anyone. I just want to Be.” Realize these are not words I would ever use now. “

Lucca is very pleased with the reaction from readers.

“I think the most important thing I hear from everyone who’s read it is that there is some really raw emotional honesty in it, and that’s exactly what I wanted to convey to readers,” she said. “This feeling, no matter where you are in your family situation, there is room for our parents to be understood as human beings and to be understood as parents. I think the idea of ​​love and sexuality, especially for single parents, is one that I haven’t talked much about. It’s really hard to navigate in these waters. “

She can now see that her father’s world was very different from the world she came from.

“He exposed us in a way that wasn’t exactly popular at the time,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of bad reactions to it, but when I was a single mom I really got sympathy for him because I could see that when you’re 35 and newly divorced, and you want to have some kind of romantic life and are a parent, and how do you do that? “

In her opinion, the book has a universal message that can apply to any parent-child relationship, regardless of whether the parents identify as LGBTQ or not. The message is one of acceptance.

“Even if they are different from us, have different beliefs, different ideals and even values, we can have a much more tolerant relationship with our family if we accept who they are and who we are,” said Lucca. “While it doesn’t mean we’re close, it does mean we’re not at odds because I’ve been so at odds with my family over the years, because I felt misunderstood when I finally accepted them didn’t do. ” Seeing the world and vice versa, in a way, it created this beautiful truce. “

Ashes to Ink is now available in paperback and Kindle editions.

www.lisalucca.com

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