Dale Loves Sophie to Death by Robb Forman Dew

Were there questions that you asked that, in looking back, you shouldn't have or questions that you wish you asked but you didn't?ĭEW: I wish I had immediately asked him, explain to me what this means. GROSS: Your son told you after he came out that you could ask him any questions and he would answer them. It's a testament to both of them that people did not withdraw their friendships from him. He's a very - well, he's a remarkable person, and his brother is, too. I thought, will people now withdraw their friendship from him? And it's a testament to him. Interestingly enough, his school will not welcome him back. And I think a lot of his energy was driven into being a summa cum laude graduate of his school and a class speaker and a peer counselor.

And now you suspect that he might have been terribly lonely in one respect.ĭEW: Oddly enough, it was the idea of his high school years that I have the most trouble with because he was so successful. TERRY GROSS: You know, you had an image of him as being someone who was just beloved by everybody. And here was this enormous burden of secrecy he had carried in order to make us happy as parents. I didn't - I knew what wasn't my business, but I thought I knew everything essential to his happiness. I did feel foolish on one level that I had not - this is a person, along with his brother, whom I thought I knew better than any other creature in the world. ROBB FORMAN DEW: No, it didn't change my image of him, but I think this is particular to each family. Terry asked her if the news made her change her image of him. When her son broke the news, he was a sophomore at Yale home on a break. Terry Gross spoke with Robb Forman Dew in 1994 when our autobiographical book, 'The Family Heart: A Memoir Of When Our Son Came Out,' was first published. She and her husband soon became members of PFLAG, an activist organization for people supportive of gay rights. The revelation first threw her into a state of grief, but that emotion soon was transformed into anger at a society which could discriminate against her son. In a later book, she focused on another son - her own - in a nonfiction memoir about how her life was changed when her son Stephen told her he was gay.

Its subject was what she called the world's last happy family - although she challenged that happiness in a later novel by revisiting the family and having the youngest son die in a car crash. Her debut novel, 'Dale Loves Sophie To Death,' won an American Book Award citation in 1982. Robb Forman Dew, the award-winning author who wrote intimately about family relationships in both her fiction and nonfiction books, died two weeks ago of heart disease.

Dale Loves Sophie to Death by Robb Forman Dew