The I Ching

The Classic of Changes.  The memoir begins with a scene of a daughter visiting her aging parents and  quarreling over their cat, who has obviously replaced her. Ching is the beloved.  Laura and Ching's dysfunctional relationship causes her parents distress, but also allows Lars and Rachel's  parental roles to remain intact. Laura and Ching have a sibling rivalry that is ridiculous.  When Laura is attacked,  Lars defends the cat while Laura bleeds, "You moved too fast!"  And then, "We live quietly, when you come it upsets her."

We learn from this introductory episode, that the cat is a child substitute for this childless couple, and that Lars has transferred affection from Laura to the cat, because Laura doesn't come around much. Ching, for her part, leaves dejectedly whenever Laura shows up.

Ching sleeps somewhere on almost every page. He is the elephant in the room. Living and sleeping on beds and boxes. On a day when Rachel calls Laura to tell her about her father's burns from the heating pad, the cat is lounging like a nude on a settee, in the foreground, licking herself. Ching is life going on.

On 15, Farmer uses Ching to reveal that Lars and Rachel are becoming incapable of parenting.  Irregular feeding results in the cat taking matters into her own hands. She starts eating boxes. On 31 Ching begins to "think" in bubbles and even curses when her tricks are foiled.  On 32-33 Ching and Laura suffer from the same affliction, mites from the poor conditions of the parents' home.

On 34, we see a "regular" cat, at Laura's house. This cat sits patiently on the floor beside the table, knowing his place. Ching on the other hand has broken free the bonds of normal pet/human relationships.

It's not until 36 that Ching begins to take her place, obediently, on a chair, observing, while Laura begins the tough work of bathing Rachel. She can't compete.

By 42. Ching is the only character in the book who sees the writing on the wall. The panel is told from Ching's pov. She watches Rachel hobbling in to the room, assisted with a walker, while sitting beside her (visibly!)  stinking litter box. She's a cat after all, and a self preservationist if nothing else. She goes outside for the first time. Lars chases her outside and they collapse together. Lars expresses anxiety that she might leave the yard.

Ching doesn't appear at all in Chapter 4 until the end - - in Lars' lap as he realizes Rachel might be blind. He holds Ching as if he knows that she might be the more constant partner.

On 55:  a panel of Laura in the kitchen preparing dinner and Ching is eating beside her from a bowl. Laura has begun caring for the cat and the roles are reversed.  Laura is parenting her parents and their  pet is becoming her pet.

In chapter 6, Laura and Ching "think" in bubbles. Laura doesn't know when to leave well enough alone, and gets scratched. Ching's thoughts are indicate that she, again, knows something Laura is just too "stupid and large" to see.

On 106, Laura again misunderstands Ching's aggression and takes it personally when it is just Ching vs. the Vacuum...
On 107, Lars instructs his daughter to feed Ching all the parts for gravy but the heart, which he eats himself to make him brave.  (Sad implication being that Ching is equipped enough, but he needs all the tiny chicken heart he can get.)

On 128 Laura accidentally breaks the cat's tail and expresses (rare) remorse to her father (not to Ching).  "I'm so sorry, Dad".

It's as if the cat gives everyone a chance to be emotional and forgiving and remorseful.

Ching, unlike any character who must caretake, is allowed to simply "be" with Lars as he lays dying.

Skipping ahead, to the end, Farmer brings closure to her memoir with a cat tale. Ching now goes outside and learns to stay nearby. The narrator has finally come to terms with the cat as a parent substitute, but I mean something more than this I can't really articulate. The final exclamation, "Dad! Dad! Can you see this!" was the gut punch, for this reader. I had been steeling myself through the rest of it.

Over. Relief. Sadness.

 

Eroticism in Mother's Urn: Memoir Dust

This is one slippery, goth text. "Girls surely do come in all sizes" (p.5) Ahem.

"Lean and loved, the sun would clay bake them into midmorning flesh heaps..." (p.7)  The text describes a consuming affair that obliterates the self - the lovers share the same side of the table they are, as in the beginning,  not in opposition to each other, and from the first moment I held this slim book in my hands it weighed heavily with a sense of doom and loss.

The image describes what the text is not prepared to reveal:  on page two, a rose is deconstructed by forks. The rose is a heart, to be eaten. It's cannibalistic and self annihilating.

On the facing page, the interior pre-nup is described, with the narrator's? hand reaching down to the splendid table, knife like fingers encased and manacled. A pinky ring is affixed to a ball and chain?  A spoon is the spear in a cherry atop a sundae.  I'm blushing.

The text pretends to make light, drawing parallels of the wedding ring to a nursery rhyme, but haven't we all heard that ring around the rosie is about the plague?

On page 4, quicker and harder... in image: the body as a guitar to be played. I'm not sure what to do with the leggy harmonica, but give me time...ohhhh,  those are cricket legs!  rubbing together, "churning something sonic".  It's perfect and lyric harmony of text and image.

The black background is darkness that is often required... the red text represents the beating, bleeding heart. The evocative images are floating free and often take over. (in the final analysis, which is poetic impressionism at best, I think that the blackness swallows the text, and the images become the greatest natural resource of this memoir...)

At the end of Christmas Myth, the images grow in complexity and busyness, but the repeating, totemic images have been warped. We are left with twisted forks and shattered glasses.

I began this post as the book begins, but it quickly becomes a bad trip into dark corridors and painfully excavated rooms. Eroticism contains a dark side, but here it is totally eclipsed by it.

Eroticism is replaced by psychedelica, as the memoir descends with the narrator into the consequences of drugs. Page 10 is a testament to the way drugs become everything to an addict. There is not a corner of this image that doesn't hold addiction. In such an altered state everything is loaded and laden. The images almost need a map key.  It was impossible for me to approach this text with a clear eyed rational response. A close reading is mind altering and disturbing. This is a trauma narrative.

I would like to talk more in class about the relationship between author and illustrator.

In other chapters the story seems even more abstract, poetified and romanticized. There are many images that seem like myth making, another kind of fairy tale. Such as the underwater image of the window washer, on page 29. The woman in the image holds a car that is bigger than her (pet) baby, and more colorful: red. A story of misplaced priorities....Her world is littered with cars, and she holds her foot in an almost caress,  around a bucket of rock while the baby floats without any support,  in her lap, blowing bubbles...

This book is a cave I don't want to go into. If it's an urn, it has blown apart the meaning of container.

Dreams Dreams Dreams

" Yeah, but don't you think that.. that if you write minutely and rigorously enough about your own life... you can, you know, transcend your particular self?"

If "Fun Home" is a cerebral deconstruction of the artificial and external influences on the narrator,  "Are You My Mother" picks up where this leaves off, to see what lies beneath. It's the psychological autopsy.   "Are you My Mother" is structured and titled as a kind of graphic Jungian analysis;  each chapter title sounds ripped from the pages of some psychoanalytical texts (True and False Self, The Use of an Object, etc.)  and begins with the narrator's raw dreams in an attempt to unpack her subconscious.  

The dream sequences are somewhat liberated from the form of the rest of the book, although they create their own pattern within the larger text, through repetition. They are drawn broadly, as if there is more room for interpretation. Bechdel uses vaguer, simpler language and sentences.  There are comic book sound effects, "Slam!" "Clunk!" and the action of the dream is told against black drop and feature the narrator herself at some time floating outside the main frames of the story.  We always know we are in a dream when the pattern repeats. 

Bechdel's dreams are specific but by including them she achieves her goal of "being more universal" (page 198). In dreams ordinary extraordinary things happen, and we've all had them. 

In Chapter 1, titled  "Ordinary Mother" (as opposed to say, the Great Mother, a Jungian archetype), Bechdel dreams of a blocked exit. The dream raises feelings of panic and surrender that lead to questions she will answer throughout the rest of the chapter.  The dream also includes totems of the subconscious that will be revisited throughout the book, creating a sense of discovery/deja vu for the reader as well as the narrator in the multilayered way we have come to expect from this author.  (S-P-I) 

Here's a typical Jungian quote about dreams,  which is mostly gratuitous: 

The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.

CARL JUNG, The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man

Here dreams are defined as deeper windows to the soul than say, eyes. Bechdel makes much of mirrors, and so do the therapists and the texts, but she gives dreams prominence. 

In Chapter 2, Transitional Objects, the spider theme (web)  becomes more elaborate, and again Bechdel notes the feeling that the dream gives her. (In this chapter "tingling exhilaration")  The feelings become an emotional thread that the story and the psychoanalysis hangs on. (S-P-I) 

In Chapter 3, True and False Self, Bechdel describes an ordinary "no pants" dream, wherein she transfers to her therapist and betrays a subconscious wish for the physical touch her mother has denied her. 

In 4, Mind: Bechdel's lover suggests the key to the dream.   Again, the feelings: "As she leaves with my pants, I feel as secure and happy as I have ever been."  The dream panels again are uncluttered, the text is minimal, the shadow of a tree outside the apartment is barely there. 

In 5. Hate: The author clings to a cliff that turns out (through the process of discovery =melting ice) to be her childhood home.  This chapter goes right to the core, deconstructing the relationship between the narrator and her mother, the narrator and her mentor,  the narrator and herself, all mothers and infants...  It's a wild chapter that I feel I can barely hang on to, where the author must come to separate/ reject her mother in order to be and live and work and love herself.  I love the lifted Winnicott (p. 174) , the list of "Some of the reasons a mother hates her baby": especially E: "The baby is an Interference with her Private Life" And how!

In 6. Mirror:  The narrator's mother takes up nearly every frame of the dream. From corset laces to bodice to full length in period costume, as if to say the mother is as inescapable as one's own image in a mirror. 

Here's another Jung quote for chapter 6: 

"The dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once scene, actor, prompter,
stage manager, author, audience, and critic" (General Aspects of Dream
Psychology)

In Mirror, Bechdel plays with the analysis, suggesting to the reader that everyone in the narrator's dream is an aspect, or reflection of herself. And everything. It seems that Alison, of the red shirt, is trying to tell herself something, in her mother's red sores, the red alarm clock, the red word, "laden". 

Laden, no kidding. By the time we get to the pimple and Stonehenge, in Chapter 7, The Use of an Object,   I'm tempted to say: I'm afraid we have to stop,  Alison... I'll see you next week. 

But oh wait, the P.S. 

The Crippled Child story panels at the very end cleverly wrap up the unfinished business from Chapter 5, Hate,  (Page 200) when the narrator interrupts a conversation with her mother to describe an anecdote from Winnicott. For this Bechdel employs the black dream panel format, perhaps because the memory is not specific and mostly imagined, it is like a waking dream. Also, it is guiding her, as her other dreams have, this time, right out of this book. 

Slippery Slope

The most striking quality of the illustration in this piece is the downward sloping of everything: noses, shoulders, jackets, faces, which after a time has the cumulative effect of making me feel slightly depressed.

Despite the color, and the laughter drawn in the goofy groups of coeds in the dorms, the direction of the lines weighs heavily;  when these characters lift their chins up even a bit, it looks almost painful.

 The brightest point in the story is the time recalled in hindsight --when the narrator believed Harriet's stories, and their friendship thrived. The colors are bright and simple: the matching sweaters and skirts of primary school are, fittingly, red.   The story almost implies that the disbelief of others, the inability to share her story/identity/truth,  killed Harriet.   The sudden switching from the whole body of Lucy  to an empty lot makes me feel, well,  like an empty lot.   (And hey, any art majors-- doesn't this look like a weirdly self annihilating face down Chagall lover flying in the air? with the night sky pillow and the bed covers like clouds? --)

Throughout the rest of the story, before and after, in the dorm, and in the midst of Harriet's odd behavior and then aftermath of her disappearance, the artist swaps Lucy and Harriet in and out of the panels in a loose and unexplained way, that creates a feeling of disorientation and disassociation. Perhaps it is the lack of connection that I find depressing.

The story is about a failure of friendship.  As Lucy and Harriet grow apart,  Lucy finds happiness in not believing the stories that Harriet tells herself to cope with the loss of her mother.  After Harriet's disappearance disbelief becomes inadequate, (it is its own kind of absence, even though it makes room for the new)  as she finds herself surrounded by people, but suffering the loss of one person who captivated her wholly.

The final frame offers some kind of resolution, Harriet's face is uplifted without the usual tension --and the narrator reclaims some identity from the act of entertaining a belief.

Personal History #2

This story was very reassuring for me, and I wanted to bring it up in class tonight, but it only seemed personally relevant---- that the narrator expressed no ambivalence about whether this incident actually happened. (Contrast with the brief question over whether her father jumped back, as if he 'd seen a snake (ghost?) , and into the path of the Sunbeam truck...instead of suiciding - an important distinction)

When I was younger than the narrator, I had a similar experience, but I was alone, so when everyone returned to the scene to find the snake, and it was gone, I was told that it probably hadn't had happened, hadn't existed, or wasn't as big as I thought it was. But I know what I saw, and if I had been the journaling kind (which I only aspired to, never actualized successfully-- sorry, world of graphic memoir I may never enter) I would have written unequivocally as Bechdel did (for once) without an "I think" or an ellipses ("Saw a snake. Had lunch") Except I would have added the qualifier "HUGE".

Anyway, just to say, it was very reassuring to see this graphic illustration of the extraordinarily sized, seven foot long snake on the east coast, on the Allegheny plateau. Because in my personal history, as memory becomes fictionalized even with the first telling,  I always wondered whether a snake of such a size existed, so persuasive was the doubt..

No comment about the psychoanalytic subtext. Just putting my thumb on the page so to speak.

Knowing Me, Knowing You

This memoir is a speed dating tour of the western canon, beginning with the Greeks, and finishing with a postmodern interpretation of Ulysses. 

Each of the seven chapters of Fun Home is tightly woven*, with themes and conflicts introduced in the first introductory panels resolving cleanly at the end.

Bechdel frames her story within two bookends, using images of herself child and her father. The first, of a child trying to make her father do what she wants, and make him into what she wants him to be (an airplane, the impossible)  and the final, of the child jumping into a pool, trusting that her father will be, at the very least, a father, and do what father's do, and catch her.  

 Each begins with a single image.   

Chapter 1, Old Father, Old Artificer, introduces the Daedalus/Icarus story with the accompanying faceplate illustrating a snapshot, an idealized portrait of the narrator's father, naked to the waist, half man, half… ? 

( Later in the book, the narrator criticizes a classmate for constantly drawing parallels to Odyssey, when the comparison has already been made, but Bechdel reminds us on almost every page, so here I go…)

An example of Bechdel's multilayered illustration as well as story telling:  On page 9,  lower right, "He would perform, as Daedalus did, dazzling displays of artfulness."  in this panel her father in cut off shorts assembling a gingerbread trim under a gable; here the image pays homage to the text while also illustrating it, the father  looks like, in profile,  like a painting in high relief on a Grecian urn. 

(Some panels are very literal, in the scene, such as the ones of children being spanked and eating dinner, or reading bedtime stories,  and others, myth making  interpretations, such as on page 7 where the father is carrying a beam as a cross, with the accompanying, also minimal text: "Libidinal. Manic. Martyerd". )

 On page 15, the narrator begins to identify herself in contrast to the myth of her father,  and sets herself apart, "I was Spartan to my Father's Athenian"..

WIthin the first chapter, we also get a window, through the television, which also appears and speaks within the frames, to a "It's a Wonderful Life", which Bechdel uses to contrast her father to Jimmy Stewart, and then compares both to Daedalus, on page 11, when she says "he was indifferent to the human cost of his projects."  The portrait of the father contains contrasts and parallels to archetypal father figure, of George Bailey, and mythological father, Daedalus, (The chapter also features, in no particular order:  Jesus, Martha Stewart and the minotaur…  We don't learn, until page 200, about the narrator's Freshman English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience"… but when I did I was like, "ohhhhh!")  

The first chapter of the book takes place primarily in the narrator's home. This is not the "fun home", but a home that has been restored with the passion and meticulous eye of an undertaker.   (Restoration as preservation, in the sense of an undertaking = both meanings fit)  On page 16, Bechdel writes, above a family portrait, the portrait of her father as a Daedalus deepens:   "He used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear as they are not."  

The artificer as liar raises a question for the narrator.  ( If my father is an old artificer, what does that make me? The story of her resistance takes up a good portion of memoir.)

Bechdel draws the narrator's home from many different perspectives:  birdseye above the kitchen table on 21, from behind the narrator, on, 3,  19, from profile, from the audience, on page 5. Occasionally there are panels which are simply interior details, as you might find in an architectural drawing, page 8,9.  We feel we have seen the house, inside and out, and left no corner of it dark.  In the same way, Bechdel's narrator examines herself, and her father's life, from all angels, drawing parallels from ancient and modern literature, second guessing, psychoanalyzing, in many ways this work of art is another kind of restoration,  she uncovers the portrait of her father as if the most useful truth lies underneath layers of paint and must be thoroughly scraped off. 

Aside: I love the idea of a book as a Trojan Horse. (p.224). (That stories can be sent into battle and surprise and overtake the enemy, as if every story is a volley over the wall,  and part of a larger argument. )

In Fun Home, Alison processes her father's death as she deconstructs her own coming out.  The grief stays between the lines and panels, leaving Bechdel, and her narrator to explore her past and pain with a clearer eye. 

Bechdel has liberated her own form.  She brings everything to the table,  and draws her own maps, (literal maps of her father's home, and sphere of influence, and maps of his life) and boundaries... She turns Ron into a Centerfold, (page 100) magnifying the moment she discovered her father's secret photo - -submitted as evidence.   She includes her own hand/ thumb in many images. In the coffeeshop Sailor says, "Look", and points to her thumb, holding the book at the same place where the narrator's life sized thumb sits on a photo. In this way Bechdel builds a relationship between her narrator and her audience.  (The viewing adds ANOTHER layer to the reading.)

  Other times, she chops up the frames into tiny bits to illustrate the moment by moment intrigue of a pivotal conversation with her father, (220)  she interrupts panels with both framed and unframed text, from letters and books.So the frames filter by like frames from a movie. The scene is dialogue, but cinematic, because we would care, in such a conversation, about seeing the character's faces.

LAST CHAPTER: 

In the AntiHero's journey, the narrator embarks on a personal Odyssey of self discovery,  which she describes as an inversion of her father's journey, to repress his identity.  To mark the path she alludes to corresponding books of the Odyssey, and places this journey in time as she is also reading, for a course, JJ's Ulysses.  The four stories weave in and out,  and revolve around a key question, What is a Father? a Socratic type of inquiry, which Bechdel begins, like any investigator, with the dictionary. The image serves the text, bringing the weight of a photographic image of the definition, while allowing Bechdel's narrator to comment in between the lines. 

The logic of this chapter as it deconstructs the lines of inquiry,   is very Greek. Inversion and questioning.

But the love between father and daughter is where the literature comes in, as it is expressed obliquely, in couplets: 

On page 199, 

("I think we were both starved for attention.")

You're the only one in that class worth teaching. 

It's the only class I have worth taking

*Penelope?

Personal history

I spoke with my grandmother today, who worked as an illustrator in NY in the fifties and sixties. She is 91, and has lived in the same (rent controlled) studio apartment in Tudor City since the 1947? or so?  She shared it with my grandfather, during their fifty three year marriage. (I'm pretty sure he is the subject of the panel in the lower left hand corner, and that that is one of their apartments. If not, the illustration is semi-autobiographical, because that looks like him.)   She said she would send me a few words about her experience trying to sell a few comic strips, when the illustration market dried up. 

This is her graphic resume. (She could be the original hipster. She even made her own clothes!) 

Jack Hart on Narrative Arc in a Show about Nothing

We just read this for our creative non-fiction workshop:

The Narrative Arc

One of my favorite Seinfeld episodes began, as they usually did, with an agitated Kramer bursting into Jerry's apartment. Kramer gyrated. Jerry looked impatient. "What's wrong?" he finally asked. "I just realized," Kramer replied, "that I have no narrative arc!" 


The gag resonated on several levels. A narrative arc is built from the orderly progression of facts through specific story elements. But at the time the Seinfeld episode aired, "narrative arc" was in vogue among the New York literati as an almost-meaningless catch phrase. We can assume Kramer was parroting the fad expression and probably wasn't quite sure what he was saying.  The irony was that he was absolutely right -- his loose cannon life, devoid of order or consistency, did lack a narrative arc. And the bit also tweaked the critics who'd declared Seinfeld a show "about nothing, " a meander through aimless lives that never seemed to go anywhere.
The tone of the show's humor did indeed obscure any narrative momentum. But in fact, a typical Seinfeld episode incorporated several narrative arcs. Kramer's schemes took off and crashed. Elaine's latest relationship heated up and cooled. George got jobs and lost them." 

Jack Hart, Storycraft, page 24

#1 (is the Loneliest Number)

Re: apples and oranges:  The narrative arc, in Lucky #1, is closer to a Beckett play than The Imposter's Daughter.


"Nothing" is a motif that is introduced on the first page, during the improv date. The narrator Gabrielle likes to "see people create something out of nothing". We learn later that she chose modeling as a job because she can make money "doing nothing". On the last panel she reveals the wisdom learned, "It turns out that doing nothing is one of the more difficult things to do."


 "What do you think? "
"They're no windows"
       
            ......

(thought bubble) "What am I going to do?"
(thought bubble) "What am I going to do?"

             .......

"MEOW!!"

             ........

"our depression was interrupted by a Yeah Yeah Yeahs music video being filmed on an old abandoned stage."


"It was too disturbing, I couldn't eat and look at it."
"yeah."


Yeah, yeah yeah.


The thing I like about Lucky, and Bell, is the contrast of real pen and ink with day to day absurdities.


The surreality of the art world that Bell illustrates so cleverly ( by shrinking massive, airplane hanger sized installations to the same size and frame as an east village apartment)  is matched and even exceeded by the surreality of relationships via post it notes with roommates, the hilarious mousetrap rigging of makeshift warehouse/loft interiors and her detailed hostile utilities negotiations.


One of the ways Bell makes the reader feel a sense of kinship with the narrator in Lucky #1, (not that I need to! just sayin') is in scenes of herself amongst other New Yorkers. In these frames I can barely tell who is talking. Bell's narrator is hard to pick out even on the cover of the book, as elsewhere, she is looking away, in profile. I feel like she could be any of the people on the subway, or wandering through the Serra exhibit.   It's not so much that her face is simply drawn, but that I am always reminded of that joke (?) "If you think you're one in a million, there are eleven of you in New York!"


On the first page, there is an Alice in Wonderland type panel, where the narrator appears to be entering a tiny door, "An artist once told me that in order to be creative you need to go into a place inside yourself and to do that you need to be alone." But much of the comedy and pathos of the first part of this memoir are found in Bell's illustrations of the artist in relation to others, whether she is modeling or partying,  she is never lonelier than in their company.


An aside about space: On page 41, when Gabrielle helps Tom move into his new place, the "industrial palace",  I wanted to do cartwheels and wave my arms and legs about, too. For once also,  the text floats like a cloud, and no one speaks.  Gabrielle captures the claustrophobic interior of NYC apartments in nearly every frame. If I was the real estate agent of Bell's frames I would have to use the word cozy more than once, and probably add "close to subway",  to remind people they're just a train ride from somewhere they'd rather be ---

....Kristin

Ich bin ein Impostor

The narrator, drawn as an adult, covers her face with a polaroid of her father wearing medals of valor. Is Sandell implicating herself? Can the apple fall far from the tree? What is she hiding? More than her face? The "TRUE" caret is provocative.  It is a clever cover and title, because it invites investigation and suggests that her identity is a work in progress. 

We are all creating from scratch when we are exiled, or orphaned, or when we learn our parents are liars, or we stop believing in them,  and life is-- to some degree --artificial in so far as we are making it up as we go along.  At the same time, it is our story, our memoir, our "truth", with a caret. 

In their technicolor simplicity and garishness,  these panels read like a tv sitcom. The light hits everything at once, as if Sandell has slammed down a director's clapboard, and called "action".

 I am struck by how megalomaniacal this medium can be.  The storyteller who doesn't just demand control of the words, but also the images that otherwise might bubble forth in a reader's brain, a natural spring from the story is tightly controlled. (Detail: mattress spring:   who wouldn't want to draw themselves in the action here, with the caption, "You were great last night?")  From the first pages, though, Sandell's panels suggest that things are not what they seem. Just as a cul de sac in suburbia hides secrets and a darker truth, so must every bubble gum image in this book. 

In Visions,  the narrator looks at herself, standing next to her father, in the mirror.  He lets her share in his deceit as she wears badges she hasn't earned, and she wonders, perhaps fairly, don't I already deserve these?  The book is also a mirror, and so this panel is a mirror within a mirror. The mirror is an opportunity to recognize the decisions you make to ignore the signs,  accept judgement, wear the uniform, take credit, even if it doesn't fit and you haven't jumped through all the hoops.  (you=she) 

The question I keep returning to is, "Do I sympathize?" 

As far as form, I admire the comic illustrations. The heart that beats in heart shape outside the narrator's body, the  simple lines that express "surprise!" the narrated"pat pat pat" of a hand on a pillow, or the dotted line that connect the narrator's eye to the father's cane (poor old dad!), or when the artist shrinks the  frame to illustrate only the - literal- eyes. On page 81,  in three sequential frames, the narrator's father shrinks in stature, and importance until he nearly disappears.  On 97, the author visits the home of a celebrity who is larger than life, whose face on the wall is larger than a piano. (We already know, from the text,  that the author has begun to prefer characters who are larger than life.) There are mulitiple moments where the author, through the images, leads her narrator to confront previously held beliefs, to recognize the flaws in her process  and to question if what she prefers and chooses is really better. 

Every once in awhile the text provides a bombshell: 

"Whatever I was hoping to find I wasn't going to get it from my mother." Despite the fact that the narrator's mother  has consistently offered a saner if blander alternative, her blindness does not translate to this form, so the narrator flies to Argentina to get to the bottom of it! By this time I am invested, for curiosity's sake, but it is also frustrating. There is a reason that this book is popular and compelling and called the Impostor's Daughter, and not My Sane, Still Standing There Mother. Who would read that??

Impostor/Imposter

I think it is interesting that the word impostor has accepted two spellings: impostOR and impostER. It's almost like the word implies that there is truth and there is truthe, with a silent e.

More soon,
Krist