.LeslieAbsher's 'Spy Daughter, Queer Girl' is succinctly written, gorgeously rendered, and emotionally illuminating. One could describe it as part memoir, part spy thriller, but it also has a wider scope.
sets the stage for the central conflict the story: The author sits across from her father in a restaurant in a tense standoff. Neither yields, nor shows their hand.The author has lived a life shrouded in secrets—secrets she never asked to keep, secrets that alter the course of her life, shape her world view, and corrode her most intimate bonds, specifically that which she shares with her father, Mike Absher.
Readers can imagine the heartbreak of this young woman, contending with loss and betrayal of this magnitude in a world where she already feels adrift as closeted gay teenager. Knowing that her remaining parent is a furtive, Cold War–era spy who either cannot or will not connect to his own children made me grieve for young Leslie and all young people like her who must carve out their own safe places when the adults in their lives don’t do it for them.
Absher the journalist finds some answers, but Absher the daughter discovers a truth that sets her free. The growth is mutual, but it is Absher’s ability to witness her father’s attempts at connection that illustrate an almost radical degree of compassion. We follow Leslie on a dogged journalist’s mission that bleeds into her personal life and at times borders on obsessive fixation only to watch it fall away, as a nuanced relationship comes into focus.
Another thing we have in common is that I also wrote a memoir about coming of age with this specific type of secret. All families have secrets, but not all of them are state-sanctioned. What struck me as a fellow spy-daughter and memoirist is the metanarrative nature of Absher’s memoir, enhanced by the fact that she could not have written a work more antithetical to the nature of her father’s. And this is ultimately what creates a bridge back to him.is a book of paradoxes.
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