Interview with Memoirist Melissa Hart

Melissa Hart's memoir Gringa: A Contradictory Childhood is the story of growing up between the polarity of her parents' worldviews and the harsh judgment of a dominant culture and surviving. As reader, I was engaged in this tale from the beginning when Hart's mother leaves her marriage to live in a lesbian relationship and full custody of her three children goes to the children's father. For Hart, sexual orientation is not the only difference she must negotiate. Her mother's small home is in a Southern California Latino community and her father's spacious house is in a white middle class suburb. In the years between childhood and college, Hart falls in love with Latino culture, questions her sexuality, suffers jokes about her cultural identity and then strikes out on her own during college by living with a boyfriend who is unable to meet the goals they set for themselves. A tour with her mother in Europe yields self-understanding and a bond that can't be broken, a very satisfying ending.

Sheila
For how long before you wrote Gringa, did you know you wanted to write it?

Melissa
I knew I wanted to explore the theme of my first memoir, The Assault of Laughter, in a more sophisticated story expanded to incorporate both my search for identity in my mother's Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transvestite (LGBT) culture and in the Latino culture that surrounded me in Southern California. Assault was my master's thesis at Goddard in the mid-1990s when I studied for an MFA, and I freely admit that it's not as skillfully written as I would've preferred. The story of lesbian moms losing custody of their kids in the 1970s and early 1980s strikes me as so important and so under-reported. I wanted to tell the story of my mother coming out and losing custody of her children in a more eloquent and expansive story, and so I wrote Gringa.

Studying for my M.F.A. degree in Creative Writing gave me the confidence to approach this story. So many lesbian moms and their adult children shy away from telling their story, if there was a custody dispute, but I worked in graduate school with lesbian Young Adult author Jacqueline Woodson, as well as with lesbian mom and author Mariana Romo-Carmona. They gave me the courage to tell this story, and also -- with poet Jane Wohl -- helped me to move The Assault of Laughter away from its rough drafts informed by a victim-mentality and into a more objective story that would appeal to readers.

Sheila
What got you started writing it? Did you publish any of it as you were still working on the book? . . .

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