Going to Wings

Going to Wings, by Sandra Worsham, is a tender and entertaining memoir about love, family, sexuality, and faith. The author loves women, she loves Catholicism, and she loves her small hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia, the home of the Catholic writer, Flannery O'Connor. The result is a dramatic struggle well worth following. This is a journey of stunning losses and successes, of fear and courage, told with admirable style and wit, with charming innocence, and with honesty. The story begins in 1975, when the author is twenty-seven, on the day she tries to tell her mother that she is gay—"Mama, I have been in touch with Ellen again"--and ends thirty-five years later with her finally coming out, first to herself and then to others. It is the story of her rejection of her own homosexuality and her attempt to change herself by hiding in the closet of the Catholic Church, after having grown up Southern Baptist. During those years Worsham is caregiver, first for her mother and then for her celibate friend Teeny. After the deaths of both of these important women in her life, she finally begins the terrifying journey of coming out. In 2010, at the Second Congregational Church in Bennington, Vermont, she marries Letha, a woman she met on Match.com, a marriage that eventually becomes legal in Georgia. The title, Going to Wings, comes from the name the Milledgeville lesbians call their weekly gathering at a downtown restaurant, "The Brick."