and... and... and...

Allison Hong is not your typical fifteen-year-old Taiwanese girl. Unwilling to bend to the conditioning of her Chinese culture, which demands that women submit to men's will, she disobeys her father's demand to stay in their faith tradition, Buddhism, and instead joins the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Then, six years later, she drops out of college to serve a mission--a decision for which her father disowns her. After serving her mission in Taiwan, twenty-two-year-old Allison marries her Chinese-speaking American boyfriend, Cameron Chastain. But sixteen months later, Allison returns home to their Texas apartment and is shocked to discover that, in her two-hour absence, Cameron has taken all the money, moved out, and filed for divorce. Desperate for love and acceptance, Allison moves to Utah and enlists in an imaginary, unforgiving dating war against the bachelorettes at Brigham Young University, where the rules don't make sense--and winning isn't what she thought it wou

Laura Hall was born in a small city on the San Francisco peninsula to a straight mother and a gay father who lived in the shadows. She grew up in the post-World War II era of hopeful optimism and entered her teenage years during the rebellious sixties. Laura's father, it turned out, also longed to rebel, although social constriction prevented him from doing so. By the time he came out to her in 1975, she was a twice-divorced, twenty-four-year-old single mother struggling to make sense of how her "perfect" family of origin could have sheltered so many secrets. Another three decades would pass before Laura would exam her own infidelities, multiple partners, night terrors, and fear of abandonment in light of the double life her father led throughout his sixty-five-year marriage to her mother. A Family Affliction is a tender and frank account of how a father's secret became his daughter's inheritance and, ultimately, the path to her own healing.