Fairyland

Featuring a post-film discussion with Alysia Abbott, author of Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, moderated by Amy Monaghan, principal lecturer in film studies and literature at Clemson University and editor of Sofia Coppola: Interviews, published by University Press of Mississippi as part of their Conversations with Filmmakers series.

Produced by Oscar® winner Sofia Coppola (Writing, Original Screenplay, Lost in Translation, 2003) and based on the acclaimed memoir of the same name by Alysia Abbott, Fairyland is a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of San Francisco’s vibrant cultural scene in the 1970s and ’80s. This captivating film chronicles a father and daughter relationship as it evolves through an era of bohemian decadence to the sober and heartbreaking era of the AIDS crisis. 

Starring Emilia Jones (CODA), Scoot McNairy (A Complete Unknown), Cody Fern (American Horror Story), Maria Bakalova (The Apprentice), Bella Murphy (Coming 2 America), with Adam Lambert (Glee), and Geena Davis (Thelma & Louise) and introducing Nessa Dougherty. The film is written, produced, and directed by Andrew Durham.

About Alysia Abbott:

Alysia Abbott is the author of Fairyland, A Memoir of My Father, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and an ALA Stonewall Award winner, a winner of the Madame Figaro Prix Heroine, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. In 2022, she was awarded an artist grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She grew up in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the only child of gay poet and writer, Steve Abbott. As a journalist, essayist, and critic, she's written for The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Vogue, Marie Claire, TheAtlantic.com, TriQuarterly and Psychology Today, among other publications. She holds an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from New School University and was a contributing producer at WNYC Radio. Her first full-length book, Fairyland was completed with the help of a Ragdale Fellowship and the wonderful staff at W.W. Norton. She's presented Fairyland at bookstores, libraries, literary festivals and universities across the United States and in France, as well as on NPR's Weekend Edition, Fresh Air, The Brian Lehrer Show, KQED's Forum, and the BBC's Outlook, among other venues. The French edition of Fairyland was published by Edition Globe on March 12, 2015 with a series of events in Paris. Additionally, the book has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Polish, and Portuguese. 

Alysia is also co-founder of The Recollectors Project, dedicated to remembering parents lost to AIDS and supporting the children they left behind. You can learn more about this project by listening to her interviews on The Leonard Lopate Show and Here & Now. 

Formerly the Director of the Boston Literary District, she now teaches literature at Emerson College and MassArt

About Amy Monaghan 

Amy Monaghan is a principal lecturer in cinema studies and 20th /21st century literature. She is the editor of Sofia Coppola: Interviews, published in the University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Filmmakers series in 2023. She also literally wrote the book on teaching introduction to film studies, the Bedford/St. Martin’s instructor’s resource guide for The Film Experience textbook. Professor Monaghan has served on juries for the Independent Film Festival Boston (2024, 2025) and the Charlotte Film Festival (2022) and delivered virtual seminars (2020, 2021) at the invitation of the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, Mass. She currently serves as a poetry reader for the South Carolina Review.