AFFLICTION

A debut memoir about family secrets and how love can endure in many different forms.

Hall spent much of her youth looking for even the smallest signs of physical affection between her parents. Although she knew the story of their romantic meeting by heart, she had a persistent uneasiness regarding their marriage, exacerbated by her father’s unexplained absences. In addition, she experienced chronic night terrors and, later, suffered from constant insecurity after she became a young mother. Then, one day, she found out some new information. In this memoir, Hall details the profound impact of her father’s coming out to her as gay in 1975 and how it shed light on what she saw as the mystery of her parents’ marriage. But the more her father revealed about his sexuality, including his account of a “love at first sight” relationship with another man and how “gleeful” he felt to “unburden himself” to his daughter (“his words spilled out of his mouth with a disturbingly delirious joy”), the more she felt burdened by keeping his secret—even from her own mother, as her parents were still married. Soon, she began to distrust her own partners and had her own secret affairs. But as her parents neared the ends of their lives, Hall began to understand the bond they shared, which finally gave her comfort. Hall’s prose is accessible as she guides readers from her parents’ early courtship to the final moments she spent with each of them. Despite the sadness and confusion she faced in her childhood—which also included the untimely loss of a family member—Hall is careful not to veer into hyperbole in this memoir. For example, when she describes her nightmares, she is matter-of-fact to chilling effect: “In a recurring one, I was suffocating under a pillow. In another, electrical wires hovered over me. In both versions, I expected to die.” Later, she effectively uses the closet metaphor to describe her own behavior: “My self-awareness in my early thirties didn’t allow me to see a connection between the dissolution of my father’s closet walls and the fortification of my own.”

A deeply moving personal remembrance.