As for Em’s writer genes, not knowing if she had any, she did what an imaginative fiction writer would do—she made up some simply awful writer genes for herself. In her inchworm way of crafting a short story, Em imagined her self-hating lesbian mother as an autobiographical novelist with no imagination at all. The writer mom’s first novel incorporated the sobbing mother’s confession to her teenage daughter—the part about the lesbian daughter who is “doomed” to have her mom’s genes, as Em had written in “A Family Comes Out.” Worse, Em’s fictional autobiographical novelist describes in soporific detail her sexual relationships with women her daughter knows—not only with several mothers of her daughter’s friends, but also with one of her daughter’s contemporaries. While Em herself had written about this, albeit briefly, in “A Couple of Latecomers Get Divorced,” there is nothing spare in the prose style of the writer mom, whose autobiographical logorrhea is fueled by her self-righteousness. If gay women, such as herself and her “doomed” daughter, do “degrading things” and are “unredeemable”—well, in the writer mom’s opinion, “homosexual men do much worse things.” Sparing no detail, the lesbian mother’s first novel describes the horrible things her “homo husband” has done with other gay men.

In Em’s third-person omniscient voice, all this happens in one short story—in which Em seems to be barely involved. Even the title sounds detached and academic. “The Problem with Autobiographical Novels” doesn’t sound like fiction, which it is. Em’s awful mother, who (by her own admission) was a worse wife, wasn’t a writer. Not yet. I read Em’s short story in manuscript. “The Problem with Autobiographical Novels” would be published in Ploughshares. Em’s awful mom—with whom, of course, Em wasn’t speaking—read Em’s short story there. So did Em’s much-worse dad.

In “A Family Comes Out,” the gay dad ineffectually beats himself with his belt in his daughter’s bedroom, while confessing his homosexuality and denouncing his wife’s lesbian affairs. In “A Couple of Latecomers Get Divorced,” the gay father tells his nonspeaking daughter that he should be castrated for the things he’s done with other men. He changes his mind rather quickly about castration—“maybe just a vasectomy,” the chickenshit dad decides.