""Fairyland," the new film based on Alysia Abbott's memoir about growing up in San Francisco raised by a gay single father, has its fair share of touching father-daughter moments. In one scene, a college-aged Alysia (played by Emilia Jones), returning from a semester abroad in France, shares a notebook of her writing with her dad Steve (played by Scoot McNairy), who is himself a poet. There's something particularly raw and real about the scene - partly because it's an actual notebook from Alysia's youth."
""So many different parts of Alysia's experience - the frustration, the anger, the embarrassment, you know, the fear - all of that resonated with me," he said. Abbott began working on the memoir while enrolled in an MFA program at the New School in New York in the years following her father's death, eventually publishing it in 2013. Sofia Coppola quickly purchased the movie rights, but it took nearly a decade for filming to start in 2022."
Fairyland is a film adaptation of Alysia Abbott's memoir about growing up in 1970s–80s San Francisco with a gay single father. The story opens after the mother's death and follows a move to a bohemian apartment where the father dates men and the daughter learns to value art and play dress-up with his roommates. A pivotal scene uses Abbott's actual adolescent notebook. As the AIDS crisis devastates the city, the daughter becomes her father's caregiver. Director Andrew Durham drew on similar personal experience. The memoir originated during Abbott's MFA and was published in 2013; Sofia Coppola later acquired the film rights and filming began in 2022.
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