THERE’S A GROWING BODY of literature about growing up
with gay parents, but it doesn’t keep pace with or nearly match the
visibility of the confederacy of dunces against “nontraditional”
families. In 2008, Arkansas did everything short of seceding to prevent
gay couples from raising children, when it passed a constitutional
amendment prohibiting unmarried, cohabiting couples from adopting or
serving as foster parents. “Queerspawn” literature combats these
movements by showcasing the normalness of childhood with the gays,
replete with as much joy and angst as any other. Unfortunately, Melissa
Hart’s coming-of-age memoir, Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood, lingers a little too long in normalcy.
Melissa’s mother, fed up with playing straight Stepford housewife,
leaves her husband when Melissa is young to build a new home with her
live-in girlfriend. Driven by spite and conservatism, her father uses
her mother’s homosexuality to wrench custody of the children. Hart’s
childhood is unevenly split between a lively bohemian home in the
Mexican-cultured city of Oxnard, California, and her Fred Mertz-esque
father’s staid tract house in Manhattan Beach. Although Melissa
painfully misses her mother throughout the novel, the separation puts
her mom’s gayness on a backburner for most of the story.
Hart’s tone is pleasant enough, but don’t expect much originality.
At times her teenage memories are over-stuffed with feeling, at once
too much and not enough. At the end of each chapter is a recipe of
sorts, in which story lines and feelings serve as instructions and
ingredients. These unsubtly deliver an emotional playback of what just
occurred, and read like gimmicks rather than creative interludes.
So much for the style, but what about the subject? Hart has plenty
to work with, not just a gay mom, but the pain of divorce and
separation from her mother and emotional distance from her
quick-tempered father. Her problems don’t stop at home: Both in her
diverse public school and in her first serious relationship, she feels
outcast by her whiteness. It’s this last struggle that she devotes the
most energy and pages to, but in trying to show her family as only a
part of her upbringing, she strays a bit too far from the most
captivating element of the book.