Cleveland Author On Growing Up In A Lesbian Home
Lara Lillibridge had an unusual upbringing. Raised by her lesbian mother and stepmother and periodically sent to Alaska to visit her father, an unrepentant womanizer who believed in “free love,” she was plagued by doubts and insecurities about her place in the world. So she wrote a memoir, laying bare both the positive and negative of her past.
You can meet Lillibridge on Thursday, January 31, 2019 at 7:00 p.m. in the Main Library Auditorium to hear about her upbringing and her book, “Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home.”
The memoir is unconventional both in form and content. Lillibridge identifies herself only as Girl. Other characters are Mother, Stepmother, Father and Brother. Interspersed within short chronological chapters written in the third person, there are chapters called “notes from the fourth wall,” where the author comments on her past. Lillibridge doesn’t hold back; anxieties, insecurities and abuse are on full display in the book. Although the subtitle is “growing up in a lesbian home,” the author’s life is also defined by her parents’ unconventional ideas and her stepmother’s mental illness. Yet there is love among the sadness and dysfunction, and the book tries to make sense of it.
A graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan College’s MFA program in creative nonfiction, Lillibridge has won numerous writing awards for nonfiction. She currently lives in Cleveland.
Join Lillibridge to hear about “Girlish,” her unique coming-of-age tale on January 31, 2019 at the Lakewood Main Library. Books will be available for sale and signing at the event.