Alicia Abbott

And then if I got a mother, I might get brothers and sisters.

Well, a pretty powerful shift in perspective.

As I was a child, like any child, I saw everything through sort of the lens of myself.

And

whether I was getting my needs met or not, and whether my dad was being fair, unfair, or exposing me to, you know, ridicule or not.

And unfortunately, he died just as I was becoming an adult.

He died four days before my 22nd birthday.

And, you know, I think...

To be revisiting the journals now, 20 years later, as a parent of two children, I have so much more sympathy for his struggles and respect.

The fact that he was a single father living among roommates, trying to find love as an openly gay man and also trying to make a name for himself as a writer is...

And that he was able to do all that, you know, just gives me tremendous amount of respect for the struggle he went through that I couldn't have appreciated at that age.

You know, nor should I. I mean, I think that kids should be protected from all of their parents.

You know, they don't need to hear all of their parents' trials.

They want to be able to enjoy their childhood.

But I was able to revisit his journals with a lot more of a sense of forgiveness and sympathy, really.

Well, I would get very excited as summer approached and I knew I was going to my grandparents.

I loved the sense of comfort and space that their world offered me.

It was a completely different world than what I knew with my father.

So my father and I would be living in an urban center in San Francisco in an apartment.

But