I would argue that remembrance is, itself, a form of mourning.

I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.

But there was a certain painful luxury in finally understanding this.

I had to get my father out of my head, so I could put him down on paper.

My parents were a closed circuit, cut off from the outside world.

I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.

The place where I was literally born was [also] the place I gave birth to my own queer selfhood.

If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.

My realization at nineteen that I was a lesbian came about...as something that would require active, even drastic measures.

You're joking. You expect me to believe you now?

Perhaps I'm trying to make sense of an apparently senseless death.

Not only were we inverts, we were inversions of one another. While I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him...he was reflecting a butchness back at me...that I in no way possessed.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic