This Is How You Say Goodbye: A Daughter’s Memoir

The author was 11 when her father died after seven years battling complications from AIDS, and in this eloquent memoir, the New York journalist, now in her 20s, traces her belated reckoning with his coming out as a gay man and his break with her mother. A handsome, fit architect, portrayed by his daughter as rather vain and emotionally diffident, Louis Loustalot commuted for four years between his office in San Jose, Calif., and Sacramento, where the author, then a toddler, lived with her mother, in an arrangement that suited him because he was secretly living a double life as a gay man. After Louis revealed to his wife that he was gay in 1989, and that he was HIV positive, Victoria moved back and forth between the two cities, until Louis grew debilitated and returned to Sacramento to be closer to his daughter in his final years. In her gently probing, reflective narrative, the author alternates between keen memories of her frequently angry and critical father and her recent attempts to grow closer to him by journeying around the globe to places that had become mythical for him, such as Stockholm, where he spent time as a young student, and the Buddhist temples at Angkor Wat, where he had hoped to take his daughter one day. She also ventured to Paris to fulfill vague romantic yearnings that she hoped to share with her father and could not reconcile through relationships with other men. Loustalot’s careful, deliberative prose delineates a young woman’s arduous passage to self-realization. (Sept.)