Shoppers and readers are turning to intimate memoirs that map queer lives; Patricia Grayhall’s Making the Rounds offers a vivid, salt‑air memoir of love, secrecy and survival in 1960s–70s America, and why it still matters as rights and recognition wobble today.

Essential Takeaways

  • Author background: Patricia Grayhall is a memoirist and novelist who lived and worked as a medical professional in Salt Lake City during the late 1960s and 1970s.
  • Tone and sensory detail: The book mixes medical corridors and personal longing, with scenes that feel immediate and tactile , think clinical corridors, smoky bars, and quiet Vancouver Island reflections.
  • Themes: Secrecy, resilience and the cost of hiding one’s identity; also sexual experimentation and the search for lasting relationships.
  • Readability: Short, candid chapters born from journals and recollections, with an audiobook edition available for listeners.
  • Why it matters: Grayhall wrote the memoir partly in response to contemporary political backlashes, aiming to offer solace and a blueprint for resistance.

A raw portrait of queerness in an unforgiving era

Grayhall opens the memoir in the hush of hospital corridors where being visibly lesbian could cost you your career. That contrast , clinical precision versus private risk , gives the book a quietly tense rhythm. According to the author’s notes, she had to conceal her identity to survive in medicine, and that coded life colours many scenes. Readers get a sense of what it felt like to be constantly performing normality, which makes the moments of intimacy and freedom all the more powerful.

Why she wrote it: memory, journals and a political jolt

The genesis of Making the Rounds came when Grayhall was downsizing and rediscovered old journals, she says, and then felt compelled to respond to present threats to LGBTQ+ rights. This memoir doubles as a personal archive and a political statement, and she frames it as a way to give courage to readers facing a renewed backlash. It’s both a private reckoning and a public call-to-arms, so you read it with one eye on the past and the other on today’s headlines.

Love, secrecy and the mechanics of survival

Finding love in the book looks nothing like a rom‑com date scene; it’s a complex dance of hints and hard‑won trust. Grayhall describes the extra labour lesbians had to invest to maintain relationships when visibility could mean exile. That tension is central: everyday choices , whom to tell, when to retreat , become charged and consequential. For anyone trying to understand how queer partnerships were sustained in hostile times, the memoir offers granular, often tender insight.

Style and structure: memoir grounded in clinical detail

Expect a voice that shifts between affectionate nostalgia and sharp, forensic recall. Grayhall moved from being a “pantser” to a “plotter” in her wider writing life, and Making the Rounds benefits from both impulses: lively episodic stories framed by deliberate structure. If you enjoy audiobooks, there’s an audio edition too, which suits the book’s conversational cadence and immediate scenes. That variety makes the memoir an easy pick for book groups or solo reading.

Practical reading tips and who will love this book

If you want historical context, pair Making the Rounds with recent polling that shows a dramatic rise in Gen Z identifying as LGBTQ; it helps you see how different generations inhabit identity. The memoir is a good match for readers of sapphic memoir and women’s life writing, and anyone curious about medicine’s social history. For book clubs, focus discussion on secrecy, the ethics of disclosure, and how political climates shape personal lives.

It's a small, brave book that reminds us why stories of resilience still matter.

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