Jennifer Greyis showing off her father’s photography (still-lifes of flowers mounted in backward frames) when she remembers there’s pasta on the stove. Scampering into the kitchen of her L.A. home, she quickly swirls the boiling spaghetti. “You have to watch your pasta!”
Sitting down over steaming bowls of pasta at her kitchen table, she’s ready to talk. She says she’s been sorting out fact from fiction in her own history, thanks to a cache of journals. And one moment in her past is how she found out about her father’s sexuality. (Joel came out as gay to PEOPLE in 2015, at the age of 82.) Her relationships with her mother, Jo Wilder, and her father, Joel, remain as steadfast as ever. (Her parents divorced in 1982.) “I speak to them every day,” she says. “But I believe in writing the book, I had to ask myself, is it possible I didn’t know?”
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Her world was shaken in the late 80s when she was dating Matthew Broderick. One day, when visiting the actor’s home when he wasn’t there, she recalls Broderick’s mother telling her, “You know your dad’s a fag.”
“She just said whatever she believed was the truth — and perhaps she was doing me a solid. Maybe she thought: Is anybody gonna say what’s happening in the world?”
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Jennifer and Joel Grey.Jon Kopaloff/FilmMagic
The moment was pivotal for Jennifer. “The reason I put that in the book, was because it was one of those days that changed me. In the sense that how could I not know everything there was to know about my dad? I was the closest to him of anyone in the world. And he would never not tell me the truth. And that was the only thing that was hard about it was because I was confused because it was one of those moments where my reality was shaken up.”
She’s comfortable revisiting painful moments in her past, to gain new perspective. “There’s a lot of rough stuff that happens in the book that happened in my life, along with amazing privilege, along with beautiful caring, loving parents, with incredible exposure to great artists and steeped in culture. Because it’s not one thing, it’s this beautiful gray. It’s not black and white. I love my name. Grey. I love my name because it is not black or white. I can’t believe like unconsciously what my dad chose that word, that name. [He was born Joel Katz.] But because of what it means, there are so many shades between black and white. There’s so much complexity in human beings. Right?”
source: people.com
