Aside from drawing readers’ eyes to a particular excerpt within a longer passage, Bechdel’s wormy highlighting has the effect of putting readers in her position or letting them “happen upon” a text from her own library with the text of Are You My Mother?.  While her narration is in capitalized, uniformly sized letters, the textual excerpts look typewritten: the letters are ever so slightly unevenly positioned, and the margins are a tad off-kilter.  Ink levels in the curves of letters seem subject to dissimilar degrees of pressure, as if some keys were pushed with more gusto than others.

Bechdel visually cites Moments of Being (some of Virginia Woolf’s essays, published after her death) by depicting herself holding the book in one hand as she holds a pen to her mouth with the other.  With the cover visible to readers but not the page number, Bechdel could be reading any portion of the essay collection.  Emphasizing a portion of this text with white outlining, Bechdel shows us where she may be highlighting with that oral-fixation pen (perhaps only a function of habit portrayed on the page and perhaps also a joking, pop psychology style nod to the often Freudian subject matter of the text): “Then one day walking around Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse; in a great, apparently involuntary, rush…” (Bechdel 18).  A slightly larger excerpt of Moments of Being is visible to readers before and after the highlighted section, as if a magnifying glass or just Bechdel’s reading glasses hone in on one part while reading an entire page.  The panel encapsulates the excerpt, creating the sense that the quoted text has smaller margins or that this excerpt from that text is partially cut off around its margins.  With slightly larger font than in some books, this excerpt seems close-up, as if magnified or really scrutinized by Bechdel, readers, or some other imagined eyeballs.  Readers could be opening the pages of Bechdel’s copy of Moments of Being to see her highlighting or readers may be in Bechdel’s position as she highlights.

On the other hand, the typewritten quality of the ink distribution and unevenly placed lettering could suggest that this is a transcript of one part of Moments of Being.  Just as she transcribes her mother’s slightly one-sided conversations with her, Bechdel probably also transcribes excerpts from books that end up in Are You My Mother?  As Sailor points out, Bechdel shows readers some of the process of creating this memoir within the memoir itself.  As Virignia Woolf describes “mak[ing] up” one of her books, Bechdel shows readers the research and textual-visual reproduction that goes into her own memoir.  Verisimilitude, even letter distribution and sizing, has its limits, even for someone who probably appreciates symmetry like Bechdel.  Nothing looks quite the same when reproduced, just as the Woolf epigraph to Are You My Mother suggests: “For nothing was simply one thing.”

Another excerpt from Virginia Woolf’s writing (this time, the exact source is unspecified) flows into Bechdel’s reconstruction of her mother’s words on the phone.  Combined thus, the passage reads (Woolf, my ellipsis, Bechdel’s mother):

But apart from her beauty, if the two can be separated, what was she herself like?  Very quick; very direct; practical; and amusing.  I say at once offhand.  She could be sharp, she disliked affection.  “If…I’m reading Sylvia Plath’s diaries.  She put her head in the oven” (29).

Between the excerpt from Woolf and Bechdel’s mother’s words are narration, “All these things will do very well to describe my mother, too,” and Bechdel’s side of the dialogue with her mother, also depicted in the bottom panel on the prior page, “But it’s hard to figure out what the story is” (29, 28).  These texts (and the memoir’s text) seem to layer so that Woolf’s quoted “If” could lead into the other phrases on the page: “If…All these things will do very well to describe my mother, too” or “If…But it’s hard to figure out what the story is.”  The first combination conveys the purpose of the excerpt from Woolf.  The second combination suggests the hypothetical or tenuous quality of the process of writing such an intertextual memoir.  Meanwhile, “If…I’m reading Sylvia Plath’s diaries.  She put her head in the oven” invokes and then collapses Woolf’s relationship to her mother and Sylvia Plath’s relationship to depression (perhaps even her fraught relationship with Ted Hughes), also showing the purpose of so many simultaneous allusions and so many broken up excerpts, left hanging or cut off at the end (with a wide-open “If” that seems to begin a quoted spoken phrase) to connect with other text on the page (in this case, especially other dialogue).  Re-ordered in whatever way, this panel can be read without some of the text, if readers focus only on the highlighted portions of the Woolf excerpt, which removes the overt first person, “I” of Woolf, allowing the text to encompass several first-person and third person perspectives.

The narrator’s sense of guilt for never being able to fully care for her mother also stands out when the Woolf passage leads into the reference to Plath: “If…I’m reading Sylvia Plath’s diaries.  She put her head in the oven.”  Woolf’s words merge with Bechdel’s mother’s words, and Woolf’s troubled search for words to describe her mother merge with Bechdel’s mother’s reading.  If someone reads Sylvia Plath, that person is retroactively responsible for Plath’s suicide.  If someone reads Bechdel’s work (especially her mother, who says “I’m reading”), those works may send Bechdel’s into a depression or toward self-harm.  That act of reading can retroactively distort Bechdel’s mother’s life through mediated representation.; it can retroactively put Plath’s patriarchy constrained head in the oven, in the house (and role) that trapped her at the time of her death (akin to Bechdel’s mother’s constraints within marriage).  The morbid cause-and-effect here evokes Bechdel’s frequent convergence of her voice, motives, or desires with those of her parents in Fun Home and Are You My Mother?, to say nothing of her concerns over the possibly detrimental, painful impact of her memoirs.

In contrast to Virginia Woolf excerpts, passages from Winnicott and Freud feature evenly spaced words and relatively uniform font, the letters less often wavering against each other, pushing against the consolidation of letters into a coherent visual whole, a word, as in some of the Woolf sections.  This consistency is comforting, streamlined, reflecting Bechdel’s desire for a way to organize or filter perceptions.  Both Bechdel’s narrative and excerpts of theory often accompany illustrations of the psychologists cited, as plot-style representations of the text, rather than as a concept-driven montages in which time converges, intertextual references cut off and fragment into one another.  For example, a longer passage of Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life appears, divided off between sentences rather than amidst sentences, the highlighted passages allowed more of their overall context (Bechdel 50).  Like many of the theory excerpt panels, the text is the minimalist star of the show.  Freud’s prose is certain of itself, while Woolf’s is usually self-questioning (or features characters like Lily Briscoe questioning their own perceptions), much like Bechdel’s own childhood diary full of “I think” marks or adult diary entry from Friday, May 29, 1987 that ends with a question mark (51).  This diary entry sits opposite the neat excerpt from Freud, its font inconsistently inside and outside of the binder paper lines.  Handwritten rather than typewritten, the letters and words are less consistently spaced from one another than in the Woolf excerpts (which seem printed or typewritten/typewriter-transcribed).  Rather than highlighting her own diary, Bechdel just shows readers a small excerpt, ending with uncertainty: “So I want Jocelyn to be my mother.  Totally.  I completely admit it.  How can I have such a strong desire when I’ve only spent 2 hours with her?” (51).  Whether or not there is a larger passage allotted to this day is unclear, but Bechdel cuts off the diary page at the end of a paragraph rather than in the middle of a sentence, as in some of the Woolf passages.