"I think I started Ning or something. Ha ha!"

THE INITIAL: 

it was initially surprising that alison bechdel decided to reveal, in insane depth, the memoir of her life, after creating a legacy of comic strips that even sustained me through my questioning teenage years. all i had to see was the word "dyke" in Dykes to Watch Out For, and it brought me closer to something i'd been repressing in myself.

with that said, i didn't expect to find many parallels between myself and bechdel's life story -- truthfully, there are many more differences, but nonetheless a thread of attempting to lend words to the unspoken, to undo our own repression, be enthralled by it, and later, bursting loose from it. she states it as, "i moved toward the thing i feared." (214)

bechdel's writing is a conundrum trapped in a conundrum, wrapped in a catechism, and worth $500 on the jeopardy daily double. it's an interesting and tiresome feat, it seems, to write about one's family in this way. that is, unless these are the emotions one associates with emotions, period. she and her brothers were raised within this, being spoonfed (in a much less intimate act) their parent's ellusive natures. her father, bruce, was trapped in a geographical and biological sense -- in beech creek, a town of 717 people, smack dead middle of pennsylvania, only united with the surrounding towns via highways. i, in my "80's baby"ness, was thankful for the historical markers such as these in the book, keeping in mind that the majority of this book took place from the 1930s-1980. alison structures a hodge podge of political events in their relevance to her life, be it by location, or parallel situations (nixon's watergate to her coming out/her father's case with giving beer to a teenage boy).

i could ramble about the whirlpool of elements bechdel incorporated to weave this tale -- the seamless metaphors from greek mythology about her parents, siblings, and herself, and the lovely, lovely "CANON!" of books her father loved. i really could. her brain is INCREDIBLE for creating such insanely complex analogies. but, rather than take you through the trenches of my brain for this, i'll focus on her childhood trauma, and its effects, both lasting and temporary.

because bechdel jumps back and forth through moments of her life in order to create a complete and thorough reflection on that tale, as if to get at the truth from all sides. she reveals little by little each chapter, and reflects on her prepubescence, teenage years, and college years as if they were a circular existence. through this, she is instrumental in identifying ways her own trauma shows up in her life, how it manifests, and her later reflection on it. as we mentioned in class, memoir is not necessarily chronological, nor are our memories -- our brains are all over the place as we try to retrieve insights and revelations about our life. she reimagined her father's death multiple times, with multiple possible conclusions, but was never ever truly sold on any of them. in fact, her father created a skeptic out of her before she could even spell it (though i'm sure she could!).

DESENSI-WHAT?

she managed to get as close as she possibly could to her father, though on the surface, the family unit was dissolving. the energy seemed consumed in helen and bruce's stale marriage: him, a closeted gay, she, stifled from pursuing acting. it didn't help that their literal environment/place of reference was a funeral parlor. from childhood, alison was able to intellectualize death with such a distance, even for her own sake when her father died. she likened herself to Wednesday from the Addams Family. A pivotal display of this was on page 44, when her father asks her to pass scissors to him as he stitched up a cadaver. the reflection over the last frame bears a, um, harbinger to her emotional reactions for the rest of her life:

"maybe he felt that he'd become too inured to death, and was hoping to elicit from me an expression of the natural horror he was no longer capable of...the emotion i had suppressed for the gaping cadaver seemed to stay suppressed." (44-45)

througout each frame, there is a slight percentage of shift in facial expression, noted in the weight under her eyes once she sees the body. she leaves the room, and her face is back to "normal". she later HA-HA's about the incident to a school colleague the same summer her father dies, so much that they think she's kidding.

OCD, REPRESSION, AND THE LIKE

her emotional trauma manifests mostly in repression, remaining vague and elusive, and developing symptoms of OCD. i realize now this is prior to the labeling of every illness and disorder, and the coercion to use pills to alleviate it (ahem, laurie sandell). sure, there was dr. spock, but alison saw from reading him that it was possible to reverse her own behaviors. still, it is unclear just what trauma caused this: her parents arguing (namely her father's verbal abuse towards her mother),  or the intensely veiled attempt at showing love and affection to each other. she already knew she was the manifestation of this.

subsequently, she begins writing "i think" in her diary, as if an innate notion that nothing is true or certain, that she knew her father was overcompensating tremendously through this immaculate house (144). even if she never got the full truth, and had to hear it from her mother at 16, what child is full of such skepticism so early, and why? towards whom? this "i think" became a shorthand symbol later, and drowned out everything she thought was certain in her journals. these compulsive behaviors resulted from what Spock describes as a "repressed hostility". could it be to her mother? or father? (i can't wait to read are you my mother? for more possible answers...or revelations...on this topic.)

REPRESSION - close to freedom?

later, at 16, she couldn't even bring herself to tell her mother that she got her period for the first time. hell, she couldn't even tell herself, referring to it as "Ning", an algebraic reduction. (also, isn't that a little late? or are there just too many hormones in our food now that accelerate that process?) i remember writing in my diary as a teen and omitting what i didn't want to believe was real or true, or circumventing the topic, in similar ways (ahem, that whole "GAY" thing and being a then-Christian). i reflected and realized my mother's behavior was the exact same. in this, i empathize with a teenage alison, this behavior resulting from her parent's reactions and dealings with their own lives. it's one thing for a teen to not want to tell their parents in defiance, but she'd been procrastinating that conversation for half as long as the "coming out" one.

for one, her mother was wrapped up in a series of situations at once, trying to create art that freed her, while still being restricted in many other senses. in general, when her parents argued, there were several things happening. bechdel located it in several parts of the house, there were several family members. it was a consistently jumbled environment that tried too hard to pose as ordinary. this would create emotional hesitation and repression in a child, wouldn't it?

later traumas manifest in a multitude of forms: she wants to believe she had something to do with him committing suicide, and refuses to let go of the slither of shaky evidence for this, as it is for her, the last bond the two share posthumously (86). they each embodied what the other didn't have; "the end of his life coincided with the beginning of my truth", she states. simultaneously, she even felt like his parent! at another point, she calls it reverse oedipus complex. shit's deep.

it amazes me that alison didn't have the same hangups about relationships as laurie sandell in the impostor's daughter, as they had been lied to equally, only to uncover more as they aged. fortunately for alison, her queerness was repressed for so long, and filtered through her father's queerness: he freed her up to be a queer, and to dive face first (PUN INTENDED) into her sexuality. even if she never got her mother's full approval, she was certain of this fact. she was queer at heart from childhood, in every sense of the word -- equipped with qualms, and a knowing that she was different from other girls. more qualms than answers followed her, until she recognized a qualm in her sexuality she was certain about, unlike her father. (it's also interesting he backhandedly considered her a "hero" for coming out, but at the expense of him being the anti-hero...hmmm).

the last example are the panels on 220-221 when she almost comes out to him in the car, and with each painstaking panel, you think she's getting close...but instead, the words are engulfed by darkness and silence. even if she thought they were "inversions of one another" (98), there's still that last veil on their relationship that prevents the truth from shining through. it's ironic that alison is now brilliant at communicating her feelings, the nuanced connections in her life and literature, and the intensely loquacious nature of her writing -- as she had such difficulty communicating her true self to her parents. i guess these things are born out of that silence...

FINAL THOUGHT: 
i also wonder what folks thought about her choice to include SO much secondary text: actual paragraphs, definitions, specific journal entries, text from other books and newspapers, as well as actual letters from her parents. how does this lend to the authenticity of her memoir, even in its attempt to highlight the grey area of everything, including truth?