Drugan’s father was a well-respected man around their suburban Boston-area town. The local dentist, he was known for his bedside manner, his local philanthropy, and his involvement in the town\u2019s Catholic parish, which his family had attended for generations. The author knew a much different man from his public persona, however; his father seemed to single out Drugan among his siblings for scorn. When the author was 13, he heard his father admit to his mother that he despised his middle son. That year at Thanksgiving, the elder Drugan menaced the boy while he was doing the dishes: \u201cHis hot breath washed in my ear and down my neck, and I was so repulsed that my knees went weak,\u201d the author recounts. As the boy grew older, his father\u2019s rage began to manifest as violent beatings. Eventually, Drugan realized that the source of his father\u2019s hatred was the author\u2019s latent homosexuality\u2014a profound taboo in his family\u2019s conservative Irish Catholic community. With this memoir, Drugan unpacks how his father\u2019s abuse shaped the man the author eventually became and details the long struggle he overcame to forgive the abuser\u2014and to love himself. (In addition to being a moving story of surviving abuse, the book is a wonderful document of Massachusetts in the 1970s; at one point, future senator Scott Brown comes to Drugan’s\u00a0aid against locker room bullies.) Drugan conveys his story in nimble prose, masterfully constructing his characters\u2019 psychologies. \u201cI don\u2019t know what exposure he had to gay men earlier in his life because he never talked about anything remotely related to sex,\u201d he writes of his father. \u201cStill, he knew I was \u2018different\u2019 before I did. My emerging sexuality eroded the modicum of humanity I had left.\u201d Any readers who had complicated relationships with their parents will likely see shades of their own family interactions in these pages.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Drugan’s father was a well-respected man around their suburban Boston-area town. The local dentist, he was known for his bedside manner, his local philanthropy, and his involvement in the town\u2019s Catholic parish, which his family had attended for generations. The author knew a much different man from his public persona, however; his father seemed to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6081,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6080"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6080\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}