Em had written me that her actual gay dad’s religion, the Church of Scotland, was “kind of Calvinist, definitely Reformed, and of course Protestant.” In her new short story—“just to be funny,” Em wrote me—she made the homo-hating gay father a self-described “Presbyterian atheist” who converts to Catholicism. In the 1970s, there was a first wave of ex-gay Christians preaching conversion therapy. Em gave the gay father in her story a crackpot conversion therapy all his own; her fictional memoirist father believes he can cure himself of his homosexual desires by adhering to Catholic teaching. But we know this guy—he hedges his bets. First he is going to be castrated, then he says he’ll have “just a vasectomy”; of course he doesn’t do either. The real reason the coward converts to Catholicism is that he likes the possibility of forgiveness provided by the Catholic Church. “You confess, you’re forgiven—that’s how Roman Catholicism works,” the self-serving memoirist tells his nonspeaking daughter. She doesn’t say a word—she just tells the story.

This one, “Why I Hate Memoirs,” was published in Antaeus. By the end of the seventies, Em and I were in the habit of writing letters to each other, and we always showed each other our new writing before it was published.

This wasn’t (I hoped) what Nora meant when she said to me I was “trying to start something with Em.” I truly believed Em and I were innocent or unaware of starting anything—just as Em, I know, never thought that her actual parents would actually become two terrible writers. Em was writing fiction. Em never intended to give her awful parents the idea of becoming writers. Who could read “The Problem with Autobiographical Novels” and ever want to write one?

“Someone with zero imagination, like my mother,” Em would later write to me, when she was beating herself up about it. And who could read “Why I Hate Memoirs” and even want to read one—not to mention write one? “Just wait—my dad will actually become a Catholic, too,” Em would write me. She wasn’t kidding.

You couldn’t write more literary (or more obscure) short fiction than Em was writing, or so I’d thought. Boy, had she managed to reach the wrong audience. Like me—but in her small, well-crafted way—Em was imagining worst-case scenarios. Sure, her stories were based on the worst things that had happened to her, but Em had purposely made them unimaginably worse; she’d exaggerated her own family’s dysfunctional behavior to the worst extremes she could imagine, short of suicide or murder.

“I’m not sure suicide or murder would have been worse,” Nora later said. The syndrome of so-called ex-gay Christians undergoing conversion therapy struck Nora as good material for her and Em to take onstage at the Gallows. Em, understandably, was feeling a little snakebit from her experience of giving her parents the idea that they could be writers. Em had thought she was being funny; she’d tried to take the self-hatred that sometimes goes with being gay or lesbian to comic extremes, but her own parents didn’t get the joke.