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’s 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: “His hot breath washed in my ear and down my neck, and I was so repulsed that my knees went weak,” the author recounts. As the boy grew older, his father’s rage began to manifest as violent beatings. Eventually, Drugan realized that the source of his father’s hatred was the author’s latent homosexuality—a profound taboo in his family’s conservative Irish Catholic community. With this memoir, Drugan unpacks how his father’s abuse shaped the man the author eventually became and details the long struggle he overcame to forgive the abuser—and 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 aid against locker room bullies.) Drugan conveys his story in nimble prose, masterfully constructing his characters’ psychologies. “I don’t know what exposure he had to gay men earlier in his life because he never talked about anything remotely related to sex,” he writes of his father. “Still, he knew I was ‘different’ before I did. My emerging sexuality eroded the modicum of humanity I had left.” Any readers who had complicated relationships with their parents will likely see shades of their own family interactions in these pages.
