The Secrets that Change Who We Are to Each Other

A conversation with Jessi Hempel, author of The Family Outing

Memoirs with Melissa shares bimonthly reviews intended to expose readers to diverse authors and life experiences. To see more of what I’m reading, browse my reading activity on The Story Graph.

Most of us know at least one family member or friend who has transitioned to an identity other than the one we’ve assumed for them. In The Family Outing, by journalist Jessi Hempel, four out of five people in the author’s family of origin are queer, an identity none of them claimed during her childhood. What are the odds of such a dramatic family transformation? Higher than you might imagine.

The percentage of American adults who identify as LGBTQ+ has doubled over the past decade. In fact, one in five Generation Z adults identify as LGBTQ+. What makes The Family Outing such an essential and relevant read, no matter how you identify in this time of rapid cultural evolution, is the book’s central question: how do we make peace with the secrets that change who we are to each other?

In her new memoir, Jessi is the family storyteller, a role she approaches with respect, curiosity, and integrity, all while staying true to her own experience. On a trip home from college, she’s the first to tell her family she’s lesbian. Over the course of the next five years, her dad comes out to himself and the family as a gay man, her sister says she’s bisexual, and her brother announces he’s transgender. Even her straight, cisgender mother has her own closet to bear: her traumatic past experience with an alleged serial killer. It’s a detail that becomes quite pertinent in the aftermath of her marriage to a gay man and the ensuing trust issues with which she grapples. 

Because I’ve lived my own version of this family’s story, my copy is streaked with highlights and pen. Some of my favorite lines articulate insights around family secrets, relationships, sexuality, and healing. In my conversation with Jessi, we compared family stories, exchanged thoughts on the fluidity of identity, and shared our hopes for building a world where our children are free to love from the fullness of who they become. In true journalist fashion, she asked the first question.

Jessi Hempel, author of The Family Outing

Jessi: I definitely would like to talk about my story, but can I ask what is the territory you hope to explore in your own memoir? What is your story about?

Melissa: It’s similar to yours in that 3 out of 4 people in my family of origin are queer. After growing up in evangelical Christianity, I discovered my brother, mother, and long-term partner weren’t straight, and it turns out, neither am I. It's been interesting to compare being born into Christianity and finding my own version of spirituality with being born into heteronormativity and finding my own unique way of connecting with people and understanding what a healthy relationship looks like.

Jessi: There's such positivity and hope for a future in that, but it doesn't mask how painful that process can be. It's sensitive and disorienting. It's hard as hell. In the time my mother grew up in, you might have just lived your entire life with your partner, because there was no room in our culture to even ask these questions. Not that it's easy to do now, but there seems to be more breathing room or more curiosities, such that we can even do the asking now.

Melissa: I sympathize so much with your mom. I’ve listened to other interviews you've given, and it’s interesting how a lot of people want to know more about your mom's journey.

Jessi: I think so much about my mother because when your spouse comes out, there's a place for them to go. My father, because he chose to live an out life, had groups to join and friends to see. There was no group for my mother to join. There was no positive identity for her to run toward. There was only the hard work of reinventing herself.

Melissa: That’s so true. I really loved how your book doesn't just explore one person's identity. It explores what happens in a family unit when someone’s identity changes. How is it possible we can be blind to such crucial things as sexual orientation, gender identity, and past traumatic experiences in the people who are closest to us?

Jessi: We are perhaps blindest to them in the people we know the best and love the most. The truth is our identities are wrapped up in each other. Part of the way I know who I am in my family unit is by understanding who I am in relation to these other people. If these people introduce a big change, that change can't help but shake the foundation of how I understand myself. It's frightening when somebody you are close with reveals some aspect of who they are that you didn't recognize or didn't see. I was pretty terrible at being supportive of my siblings when they came out. I did what we often do in families, which is make it about me instead of them. When my sister told me she was bisexual, instead of listening to what was going on for her, I tried to make sense of it in relation to my own identity. The only way I could do that was to keep her solidified and say, “Oh no, you're wrong about who you say you are.” Eventually I came around to understanding that was bad behavior. And that didn't stop me from repeating the same error with my brother a year later when he came out as trans. If I had stopped and said “Tell me more,” I might have been able to meet him in a more honest and courageous space.

Melissa: In my own family, we all have different identities and experiences. But it can still be difficult to understand each other. 

Jessi: Show me four queer people, and I will show you four queer people. The queer experience is not a unified or universal experience. And I only use the word queer because I'm desperately searching for one word to lump everybody who has grappled with these things into a category. And even that falls short. The society we live in would like to put you and all your family members into the same category because it's easier to think about from an outside perspective. The truth is those journeys are independent and individual.

Melissa: This conversation makes me give props to my brother. About a year and a half ago, I came out as questioning my sexual identity. It was three months before I planned on getting married to a straight, cis man, which I did. Everybody was very confused. But when I told my brother, his response was “I don't understand, but I love you.” And then he asked “Do you feel lighter? Do you feel freer?”

Jessi: Wow. Isn't that the most honest thing we can say to anybody we love? If you are in a monogamous partnership with one other person, then the rest of the world chooses to define you and move on. My wife is bisexual. We've been together long enough that I can't give you the exact number of years anymore. I anticipate and hope we will continue to grow together as long as I can imagine into the future. And it doesn't change the fact that her identity is bigger than our partnership. 

Melissa: I love watching your family’s relationships evolve around sexuality and gender. I think that's where progress happens in terms of our larger societal evolution in being more open-minded and accepting. It happens at home. 

Jessi: That is where humanity's progress is being forged. That is the front line. In the narrowest sense, this book can be looked at as a story about people coming out. But what it’s really about is how we allow identity to change, and how we allow each other to change and grow.

Melissa: How do we get these types of memoirs typically classified as LGBTQ+ into peoples’ hands? How do we get people to understand they often apply to a broad audience and not just a specific subset of the population?

Jessi: I wish I had a good answer to that. But I will offer this: I was on a speaking circuit with a Pakistani author who'd written a book called Fatty Fatty Boom Boom about body image. Were it not put in my hands, I wouldn't have opened and read it because I would have thought, Pakistani, female author. Great. But I don't read a ton of memoir, and I don't have anything in common with that person. Then I read the book, and I was like, Oh, my goodness. I have so much in common with this writer. I love her work. I don't know how you get over that challenge, but that’s an example of the way in which we all categorize people's experiences before we dive into them. Memoir done poorly doesn't transcend experience. It’s just an accounting of the events that have happened to a person. There's enough of that in the world that you can be forgiven for missing the fact that memoir done well reminds us of what is true, which is our universal humanity. We're all connected.

Melissa: Tell me about the sense of humor you share with your family of origin. I can think of examples from the book, and I recognize a similar sense of humor with my family. Do you think that’s unique to queer families?

Jessi: I don’t know that it’s unique to queer families. When you have positive relationships with your siblings, and you grow up with them, you have so many layers of shared experience. There's a shorthand you have with them that you have with no one else in the world. Nobody can make me laugh like my sister. It's a humor that exists because we have known each other through and through, forever and ever. And that humor reinforces this feeling of belonging.

Melissa: With your siblings, how did you get to the point of taking each other seriously in terms of your identities?

Jessi: I think it happened at some point in our mid-twenties, once we had all established our own lives, and we found ourselves seeking each other out again on our own terms. There was also another experience when my brother decided to get pregnant with his first child. He really wanted to share that experience. He told me there were these documentary filmmakers in LA who wanted to follow him around, and I said, “Evan, you have a writer in the family. If you want to share this experience, let me write about it.” He agreed, and I ended up writing a story for Time Magazine that, unbeknownst to me, would become a crazy viral success. My attempt to tell the story of my brother's pregnancy was the first time I interviewed him, not as my little brother, but as the subject of a story where I asked open-ended questions. I let him talk, and didn't assume I knew the answers. That's when I really began to accept my brother on his own terms. When I actually asked him about his life, I learned a whole lot of things I never knew.

Melissa: In the book, you really get at each family member’s experience in a journalistic way that somehow arrives at the emotional center where your stories intersect. How did you balance the fact-finding side of your writing with the larger emotional truths?

Jessi: I am glad they feel somewhat balanced to you. The fact-finding was a great effort. When people told me their stories, I learned a lot of things I didn't know, but I also learned it's hard for us to remember things correctly. Even when five people are trying their best, the memories don't always line up well. For example, my siblings and I were in our mid-twenties, and our parents were on year two of a prolonged, messy divorce. We, their kids, scheduled a conference call where we told them we wanted it to be over already. My siblings and I all remember this call. When I asked my parents what they remembered, both of them had no memory of it. Memory just works differently. For our parents, their children were never the crux of their marriage. Our opinions about it didn't weigh nearly as heavily as their opinions. So they don't remember us sitting them down and telling them what our opinions were. Whereas for us, our opinions about their marriage were crucial. It was just a different point of view.

Melissa: Are there any challenges you're facing as a parent in trying to raise two children in the current climate around LGBTQ+ rights? There's a lot going on around that.

Jessi: I have been very anxious about the inevitability of the examination of gay marriage at the federal level and was very happy when the Respect for Marriage Act passed recently. My children are four and one. We live in New York state, and I am on their birth certificate despite the fact that I'm not a genetic parent. We spend a lot of time in my wife's home state of Mississippi, and now I can count on being recognized as their parent there. When I take Jude to the doctor, because he has a zillion ear infections, I know I can oversee his treatment. That's a big deal. 

I worry all the time, but I don't know that I worry at this point more than other parents. Something else recently was that my son said to me, "Mom, I have two moms, right?" And I answered yes. Then he said, "I want you to go away, and I want Mike to come over." I started to have a bunch of feelings like: He's feeling a deficit. He's feeling lack. It turned out, the reason why he wanted to ask [our neighbor] Mike to come over is because Mike is really good at basketball. When I told him I can play basketball, too, he said, "Okay, you can stay." I'm very quick to make his small questions into big truths when they're just small questions at this point. I hope when the bigger truths emerge, we will be up for answering in some way.

Want this Memoir?

Consider purchasing from Femme Fire Books or your local independent bookstore. Read more from this author at jessiwrites.substack.com.

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