Head-body ratios fluctuate in Special Exits, and the proportions of bodily extremities to torsos sometimes make parts of characters seem closer to readers than the placement of their bodies in relation to furniture would otherwise suggest.  The unusual sizing of the body parts and bodies in relation to their surroundings help account for tensions that the text raises and cannot resolve because of the relatively early stage of grief in which it ends.  Certain uncertainties cannot be adequately answered, and centering out-of-proportion figures and parts allows the panels to hold these anxieties rather than superficially “tying up loose ends.”  These are “exits,” after all, and not endings, per se.

When weighing her options with the Hospice workers, Laura’s head makes the rest of her body seem smaller, as she cringes, crosses her right arm over her waist, and presses her legs together tightly (Farmer 175).  She is shrinking herself out of the panel, but her unresolved dilemma about her father’s care is central, ballooning her head: “Tough choice, that!”  All eyes are on her, and she looks away from readers and people in the panel, her left hand fingers pushing up against her tight-lipped, tense mouth as she asks, “Can we get some physical therapy for him?”  The answer leaves her just as tense; there is no unambiguous choice in decisions about her father’s care.  The consequences take up space in the panel by engorging her brain so that one part of her takes up more space than the rest of her physical presence, which she diminishes visually while taking care of her father towards the very end of his life.  Even her facial expressions remain stylized and have less range than those of her parents; a level of compromise happens when she cares for them, and the memoir centers her parents’ character development.  Her head has to be full of thoughts but those thoughts can’t all leak out because they might overtake the focus of Special Exits, as her out-of-proportion head threatens to overtake some panels.

Similarly, the nurses’ judgmental expressions seem larger-than-life, although their bodies have a sort of stylized proportionality (Farmer 141).  In fact, their bodies must take up an unusual but not a larger space than their faces because their body language conveys just as much judgment: they overhear the conversation about how/if/when Lars hurt Rachel.  Standing in for readers’ unanswered questions about the stress of caring for a loved one and the possibility of abuse, they reproach Laura and Lars in the hallway, glaring at them with unresolved anger that the text never resolves.  In the center of the panel, they raise ambivalent responses to Lars, complicating the empathy that the text may engender for him.

Laura’s feet and head seem closer to readers than Ching, although Ching sits just in front of Laura’s chair and her footrest, the cat’s tail touching the carpet, which is closest to readers in relation to the background and foreground of the panel (Farmer 200).  Background and foreground seem delineated by a vase on a table near the wall as the farthest point visible in the background, in front of which is a chair, in front of which is Laura’s chair and her footstool (slightly closer to the foreground than that chair), Ching, and the carpet at the bottom and lower right corner of the panel.  Granted, Ching is an itty bitty feline, but Laura’s foot, her magazine, and her head seem just his size.  Overtaken by Laura and objects in the panel, Ching seems to be shrinking out of the narrative, as does any richly detailed home décor detail.  Meanwhile, the rest of Laura’s body seems relatively proportionate to the chair and footstool.  Both chairs are about the same size, although Laura’s seems closer (judging by its placement on the floor) to readers than the wooden chair near the back wall.  However, the back wall is vague, illuminated as much by seemingly random shadows as by the light that seems to come from multiple points in the panel.  Neither light, proportions, or object placement in the panel can anchor the images therein.  In contrast, most earlier panels feature densely shadowed, textured backgrounds, particularly the kitchen and living room of Lars and Rachel’s home.  Ching takes up more space and is only slightly off-center in the final panel, similar to his position in that page’s first panel, when he jumps the fence (Farmer 200).  Clawing and cuddling Laura in the final panel, as she exclaims, “Dad!  Dad!  Can you see this?!” the cat seems to represent Laura’s stage of grief: she accepts the loss of her father, and she is letting go, but she seeks an ongoing connection with his memory.  The cat escapes, returns out of anxiety (and possibly dog-related injury), and claw-cuddles Laura; his departure is bittersweet, tense, characterized by conflict (“Bark?,” “Mee Yow!,”  Woof?,” etc.) and incomplete.  Ching leaves only temporarily; Laura has not quite reached a point where her father’s “exit” seems permanent.  Nonetheless, Ching’s continual shrinking in the middle panels on the page and the cat’s character shift at the end (Ching may grudgingly offer Laura affection) offer a potential for gradual letting-go, albeit one that claws as much as it embraces.

Quilt Vomit

Backgrounds in Mother’s Urn resemble melting ice cubes that re-solidify halfway into tiles or quilt squares that resemble widened, abstracted magnifications of the two quilts that show up early in the text (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 3).Rather than stitched together securely, these images refuse such easy sutures, instead underpinned by gentle gradations of green and aqua that move dizzyingly through firm, black lines that seemingly fragment each body and object.  When it shows up, this flowing color undoes the divisive effect of the black lines, so that every memory has boundaries that are always transgressed; there is a discomfort between the lines and the colors that ignore those lines.

A childlike tricycle-riding figure is sliced up by those black lines, but those black lines allow that figure’s relationship to the background; the lines seem arbitrary and the figure moves toward no certain location, awash in various objects atop a tile-quilt background whose churning colors sweep everything along too fast and too slow to divvy up, dry out, scoop out of the background (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  The Oceanic palettes complement the references to blue pills, giving the impression that these backgrounds are infinitely permeable, watery and only momentarily “solid,” subject to shifting perceptions that have a consistent relationship to those pills.  The details around change, although fluids are often present, just as the text hones in on different details, moments, memories.  Time breaks open and it doesn’t heal.

Juxtaposing flowing motion (like the background) with inanimate references to “motion” (objects in mid-flight/mid-flow), Art Deco swooping angles smoke and rapidly abandon several cigarettes in a floating ashtray (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  There isn’t enough heat to keep those cigarettes smoldering but there’s so much heat that the wineglasses and fork can’t withstand the heat (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  Everything is either burned up, drowned, or both.  Even more line-segmented than the child’s leg, the hand of a parent claws into view like a stained glass mannequin that can’t quite attain full animation(Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  An absent Tamara de Lempicka could be snorting enough coke to get a bit of a nosebleed, and her green lady’s nose springs like a jack-in-the-box out of a tambourine clock hotplate that melts, caves in where numbers would be on a clock that can still tell time or where the burner spiral would screw into the base on a hotplate that can maintain a stable temperature (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  Liquid is the most “still,” its particle flecks frozen mid-spray rather than seeming full of motion, like the color in the quilt background (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  Wine is interchangeable with blood; they share similar shades.  There are attempts to anchor moments in object-based detail, and the sense that time is moving quickly around these floating but relatively visible objects.

The fly wings connected to the child in the upper left corner contrast with the whole fly under the dome in the lower right corner (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  Body parts can stick together through solid lines, but the places where those limbs join wings or a calf joins another part of same calf are arbitrary (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  The fly wings close-up are the same on a human or on a fly; images can be cut up and re-glued together over and over again, with the same visuals standing out but no stable composite whole (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  Look at the fly far away but under a dome; it’s trapped amidst puzzle pieces at odds (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  Tie a fly’s wings to a child on a tricycle; they’re trapped in reconstituted pieces (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).   Everything is a swallowed-down, thrown-up, incomplete run-on sentence that is blocked out, remembered through drugged filters, and difficult to process.

From the get-go, forks fly along roses, almost standing in for their thorns.  Evoking the delightful dining referenced by the text, these forks seem to facilitate enjoyable evenings.  It’s easy to forget how sharp they are for all of their appeal, much like the mother’s boyfriend(s) in this memoir.  Fractures across an arm reveal blood earlier on to show a body opening as the mother is idyllically romanced, vulnerable in a seemingly desirable way (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 2-3).  While this can be ominous, it is also comforting; blood is a part of her body that can be seen inside and on her arm (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 2-3).  It is overtly a part of her, produced within her, distinguishable from wine and other substances that do not feature largely in the image.  Later, white and red fluids can be produced inside or outside of humans; their porousness is not detailed; everyone leaks, drinks, and leaks some more while the objects around also lose any ability to contain one instance or memory from another (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).

Wine glasses are in the midst of a backwards and forwards mitosis; two wine glasses are dividing from one and one is merging into two; they melt (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  Holding down details proves challenging, and images may be doubled or blurred.  Those arbitrary lines seem an attempt to hold down images in a sequence that refuses chronology.  Time is a drugged: “Until the parties stopped” (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 11).  When motion becomes more standardized, images become singular, the montages are less montage-y, and color schemes are not so much like quilts that once held the illusion of “whole memories” that have become explosions of oceanic vomit that contain focused-on details that are part of larger memory collages.  It’s not that life gets easier to swallow and keep down; it’s that memories are depicted differently at this juncture, so that the after-effects of the “parties” become delineated as scenes rather than pieces of scenes converging as one, long “party” (binge).

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.

Knowns and Unknowns

Addressing the loss of a friend (Harriet), the irredeemability of Harriet’s disappearance, and the likelihood of that friend’s suffering, this short plays with speaking and not speaking, looking and evading gaze, the known and the unknown.  Emphasizing the act of not telling, one panel floats the phantasmic words, “But I can’t,” capitalized, distinct but blurred at the edges.  Except for an inviting, yellow light in one window of some square-block style “halls of residence,” the scene seems more about the absent or the dead than the living, the residential building’s vacant windows like hollow eyes or mouths that are open and say nothing.  Immediately prior to this panel, the narrator looks evasively away from readers and is situated in the lower, right-hand corner, shrinking away from acquaintances in earlier panels and towards the ghostly “But I can’t” of this next, aforementioned panel.  People gradually fall away; they are plentifully present in earlier panels, their spoken words taking up space.  For the most part, “But I can’t” takes the place of both people and dialogue said aloud.  At this point, silent words take over and tell the story of Harriet, who believes in extraterrestrial abduction and disappears as a teenager.  Colors become increasingly sparse as memories engage with the unknown, as memories become more and more a form of coping and reconstructing a series of “knowns” and “unknowns,” including the unresolvable disappearance of a friend and the two friends’ at-odds conceptual frameworks/belief systems/what have you.

Harriet’s eyes are generally indistinct, shielded by glasses.  Accentuating the gap between known and unknown and emphasizing the narrator’s own unknowns about Harriet, the narrator’s outlines the limits to seeing what the friend “sees” as a teenager.  Harriet’s glasses mediate the seemingly knowable aspects of Harriet, just as the narrator’s text grapples with the known and unknown of who Harriet becomes and what Harriet knows about (1) what may be Harriet’s alien abduction, (2) what is Harriet’s disappearance, and (3) Harriet’s use of the belief in extraterrestrial abduction as a coping mechanism (from childhood to teenage life).  Harriet’s gaze is indirect, shifty, and calls attention to the tensions that lead the narrator to disconnect from a friend.  Not meeting Harriet’s gaze straight-on and not knowing enough about Harriet’s increasing obsession with extraterrestrial life to give readers the illusion that they can look into Harriet’s eyes and see much, either, that gaze seems a visual way of telling readers, “I don’t know what my friend saw, so how can you?”

Dark shadowing in later panels provide a sense of heaviness to the narrator’s sloping shoulders, showing a silent weight of grief and anxiety over the unknown, especially as the narrator consistently looks away from readers with downcast eyes.  These shadows increasingly outline and surround the narrator and Harriet, complimenting the ever-present line-drawn bags under characters’ eyes, invoking the sleeplessness that can come from fearing the gaps in knowledge around the loss of a friend, as well as the gaps in memory/perception: What is in the shadows (unknown)?  Less and less is known, as the narrator later breaks down in a list of what “I know.”  Meanwhile, Harriet and the narrator’s sweaters retain their color as distinctly recalled outward markers of memory (“I wore a red sweater that day”).  Both characters’ hair and clothing stand out in more color, as if they are better remembered than other details.

As in the transition panel (“residence halls”) from the casual abduction conversation to the recounting of Harriet’s story, people become secondary to scenery in the panels depicting the brief police search for the narrator’s friend.  Grass, fences, and pathways/roadways are not exactly sharp, but hauntingly brush-stroked into sinisterly pastoral scenes where the landscape is more in-focus than the cop cars that drive in shadow but can’t bring illumination into those shadows.  They can’t find the friend, and they can’t shed light on the details of the disappearance.  The setting is known; the disappearance is unknown, shadowy.  The friend wears shadows in the last panel but isn’t subsumed within them; the memory of the friend is inseparable from the memories that are unanswered, partially reconstructed, subject to the omnipresence of the disappearance (conscious of the “end” that can never end in the sense of redeeming something or providing irony unmitigated by trauma/violence/loss re: friend believes in alien abduction and disappears).

Situated in the lower left-hand corner with face tipped up to down a drink, the narrator’s eyes avoid gazing in any direction, detached.  In another panel, the narrator’s body stands in visually for what readers, other classmates, and the narrator cannot see: Harriet’s body. Sprawled out face-down, the narrator’s body is vaguely drawn, representational of a body more than detailed to depict the narrator’s body in particular.  The narrator’s body has life, as the words shouted by the narrator’s parents from out of the panel suggest, but the position of the narrator invokes death for a moment, confronting readers with the unknown: Is the narrator dead?  This conveys the attempt to consider, think through, grieve, and accept the unknowable aspects of the death, something that the narrator may be experiencing as a result of the loss of Harriet.  The visual immediacy of this pseudo-death may extend empathy for the narrator to empathy for Harriet, detracting from the impulse to reduce Harriet to a joke about the extraterrestrial unknown, making Harriet’s disappearance a bit more real, a little less abstract or ironic, more a reality than a plot device.