Welcome to Litsy!

Laura Hall was born in a small city on the San Francisco peninsula to a straight mother and a gay father who lived in the shadows. She grew up in the post–World War II era of hopeful optimism and entered her teenage years during the rebellious sixties. Laura’s father, it turned out, also longed to rebel, although social constriction prevented him from doing so. By the time he came out to her in 1975, she was a twice-divorced, twenty-four-year-old single mother struggling to make sense of how her “perfect” family of origin could have sheltered so many secrets. Another three decades would pass before Laura would exam her own infidelities, multiple partners, night terrors, and fear of abandonment in light of the double life her father led throughout his sixty-five-year marriage to her mother. A Family Affliction is a tender and frank account of how a father’s secret became his daughter’s inheritance and, ultimately, the path to her own healing.