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The Family Outing

From Harper Collins

In my memoir, The Family Outing, I used my own family’s story to explore what happens when the identities we keep hidden finally come into view.

I grew up in what appeared to be a picture-perfect, middle-class American family. Beneath that surface, each of us was struggling with truths we did not yet have the language or permission to express. By the time I reached adulthood, every member of my immediate family had come out in some way: I came out as gay, my sister as bisexual, my father as gay, my brother as transgender, and my mother as a survivor of a traumatic encounter with an alleged serial killer.

You’d be mistaken to think that this is a collection of coming out stories. To piece this work together, I reported deeply into my family’s past, interviewing relatives and revisiting the stories we had told about ourselves, to understand how secrecy shapes a family—and what becomes possible when people begin telling the truth. Coming out set off a much larger process of revelation, reckoning, and transformation for all of us.

That inquiry is central to my work more broadly. I'm interested in how people make sense of change, how identity influences the lives and institutions we build, and how honest storytelling can help us see one another—and ourselves—more clearly.