Special Exits...

Joyce Farmer has offered us a work that is profoundly human, and humanizing - with all of its complexity. She introduces us to characters who demonstrate the way in which we live all complicatedly rich lives that are steeped in flaw and contradiction - both in the space of the home and much more broadly. I would argue that with this work she gives us evidence that it is in those spaces of incongruence that our deepest selves are revealed. 

But I want to focus on how she did what she did, because it with delicate brilliance that she framed this story... Death is not an easy thing to write about without falling into the trap of sentimentality. Here are *some* of the things I noticed her doing:

1) Placing us in present tense. We experience events as they happen in this retelling. There is no omniscient narrator interpreting (and over interpreting) the events on our behalf to drive the "story" home. This allows space for the reader to do that interpretative work on their own, demonstrating trust that the story itself is conveying the complex emotional weight without explicating what each of the meanings we should be drawing from the narrative are. One of the benefits of this craft choice is that this form of storytelling leaves a kind of space open wherein the way in which our reader's own intersect with this story can be more easily activated from a place of emotional encounter. We have to wade through less individualized meaning making which in this case allows the universality to sit quietly present. (I think that this challenges what we explored during our examination of Are You My Mother when we spoke about the power of writing very specific stories through a very personal frame to reveal the universal application... I think both can work).

Further, this memoir works on a collective experience (even if that experience ultimately runs through the lense of Farmer's memory) rather than rooting itself in the singular body, mind, spirit, heart of the protagonist who is engaging in meaning-making as an act of personal repair (even if as was mentioned in the articles I read, that it was ultimately an act of catharsis for Farmer). I think this work provides an interesting model for those wanting to write collectively owned stories - stories of families and, more broadly communities, and provides an important counter-approach to some of the other graphic memoirs we have read in this class.

I think what made this possible is the way in which place and the body takes on such a central roles in this text. Farmer keeps our gaze centered in the claustrophobic home, with all of the rich detail, paralleling Laura's clean-up/take apart process, as Lars and Rachel's bodies fall apart; and in placing the home in continual intentional juxtaposition to the outside world - through the invocation of world events and the very precise moments rendered where Lars and/or Rachel are actually outside of the house. (I know there is a lot to say about the specific events that she chose - I want to focus on craft not content but I'm excited to talk about these elements in class because I think they are incredibly important issues with(in) the text).

As well the body becomes the story, and in a sense main character. Because the body is simultaneously so specific and yet so nonspecific and universal, what happens in the bodies of Lars and Rachel, and Laura, allows a certain collectivization to the specific stories of their passing.

2) The story lives primarily in the space simple of dialogue. Through this we organically come to know each of the characters as they are/were (albeit through the memory and rendering of the writer, but still). The effect is that the story does not feel controlled in the same way that which narrator/protagonist centered stories tend to feel. It is in the in-between space, the great unspoken, that the emotional weight of the story plays itself out - we are not drawn into the psychodramatic exploration of an individual living through these stories. When Farmer does deliver us with specific meanings it is again through moments of powerful dialogue that in their honesty, sparsity, and simplicity reveal the whole world of emotion and action that lives beneath words. Some examples that rocked me:

"I always kept mother too high on a pedestal. I couldn't allow myself to love you." (72)
"Yes, well - things get worse in such small increments that you can get used to anything." (85)
"I suppose this is the suit I'll be buried in." (118)
"It's hard to come home after being out for any reason. We really have no contacts outside the family anymore." (129)
"(Lars) It took fifty-five years to make the turn around. (Laura) What turn around? (Lars) Since I diapered you!" (165)
"The whole experience would have been interesting if it had happened to someone else. The ambulance ride home was the best part." (173)
"(Lars) Here's the modern obol, a Greek two-drachma. Was it up for me will you? Nice and clean. (Laura) Ok. But why? (Lars) I want to keep it near me to pay Charon when the time comes."(184)

3) In Paul Karasiks review of Special Exits on The Comic Journal (http://www.tcj.com/reviews/special-exits/) he identifies the strategic impact of using frames that are almost precisely the same size throughout the whole piece. "Farmer’s way is to lull the reader through regimented panel layout and brief dialogue into thinking that not much is going on. At first glance, her decision to stick to a fairly rigid grid appears monotonous. But it is, in fact, a brilliant move that allows every small sidestep off of that grid to take on a deliberate meaning. More importantly, the grid serves like a metronome for these lives tick, tick, ticking away. The power of similar sized panels forces the reader to ingest material at a specific rate and rhythm. As in real life, parched lips tasting a cool Dr. Pepper is as big (or as small) a moment as feeling the rumble of a California earthquake." This lends a deeply organic, intimate, and honest cadence to the work

Farmer introduces some very important questions regarding the kind of isolation the elderly face within our society face, our general reliance on a health-care system that is dehumanizing and focused not on prevention but managing of symptoms and is void of a spiritual understanding of health (this is not explicit but when we examine how the entourage to death plays out within institutions like care facilities and hospitals as is depicted in this piece I would argue that the commentary is there), poverty, caregiving in the context of capitalist nuclear family formations, as well as issues of identity. I won't discuss these here but look forward to doing so in class...

As usual so much more I would love to explore here also in terms of content, but again I'm trying to keep my comments focused on craft.

Light,
mia

The way we arrange our memory

Note: I am writing this response from memory of and copious notes taken from the book.



Again my apologies for the lateness of this submission but I'm happy to report my headache which I think bordered migraine is only vaguely pushing at my forehead now.

The 46 sparse poetic pages of story and image in Mother's Urn succeeded in drawing me into a world of heart ache, leaving me with rough unanswered questions and a sense of searching at the end.

I want to talk about a few things in this reflection that struck me in this work.


1) Image

Mother's Urn utilized an incredibly unconventional UBAPO approach to the interplay of text and image. I was interested in my response to the fact that the images and text were not created by the same person. When I started the piece trusted the images less than I have with the other graphic memoirs we have read in this class. I found myself wondering what was lost in the translation of Kalamity J's scattered memory to word, as these words as they then passed through the interpretive lens of an artist who perhaps had no original direct referential memory of the events described in the work from. This brings up really interesting questions for me about how we render truth, truthfully. Do we need to remember the things we write about in memoir? Within my own work I know I often rely on my imagination to see into events and circumstances that I did not live through but that I have lived the lingering impact of. I do due diligence to research as thoroughly as I am able to understand the surrounding circumstances of these events, however there are some things that only my experience of living as a human on earth - the complexity of emotion and sensation - can allow me to access what I perceive the experience of another might have been, based on the way their story has lived into my life. Kalamity J in the text seems to use this strategy herself, particularly in the first chapter of this work where she initially appears as a two year old baby. She richly recounts the love affair between her mother and the man who became her step father, seeing into environments and moments in time that she was not present for. So given all of this, is it fair that I trusted the images less? How was the artist's process of visually interpreting these stories really differ from Kalamity J's own work of remembering into things at times in this text could not?


2) Arrangement

I found Kalamity J's choice in the ordering of these stories deeply intriguing. She opens the piece in such a way that centres her mother as the main character to whom we build attachment immediately. In fact it is a number of pages in before we even find out that Kalamity already exists as the story we are being told is playing out. This choice maps for the reader the way in which her mother, and Kalamity J's longing for her - both in her mother's presence and absence - informs her sense of identity - at least in this work... and in my case this successfully caused me to also build a sense of their world around Kalamity's mother. In chapter two, when we find her mother absent she is continually called forward as Kalamity looks in the mirror and sees their resemblance, as she pieces together in memory pictures that she does not have, as she acts out the transmission of addictive behaviours inherited from her mother. I think the choice to open the story with the incredibly vulnerable and passionate scenes disarms us against her mother, whom in another rendering could be villanized considering the choices that she makes and their impact on her children. Instead Kalamity J's telling allows us as readers to understand her mother with complexity beyond the wounds of her present-absence and absence, with a level of humanity and compassion that at times seems surprising.

The closing to the last chapter to the piece left me with questions, some confusion and a sustained sense of longing. I found myself suffering story greed. I wanted to understand how, when, and what her mother had died of. And I wonder now if perhaps the motivation behind this choice was to keep the reader focused on that which she was struggling instead - it didn't matter why her mother wasn't there, that it was her absence itself, which can never be reconciled, even with the specific details. This is the first chapter in which we receive a direct and prolonged characterization of Kalamity's internal emotional world. Most of the piece allows for/asks the reader to infer what the emotional landscape is by providing snapshots of particular external moments against which we must imagine a child navigating her world and sense of self. This succeeds in drawing us emotionally in as readers because we come an accomplice to Kalamity's story.


2) Silence and Memory and Silence in Memory

This book also seems to be a treatment and exploration of memory. The way we remember people and events is often shaped by narrow elements of their full actuality. For example the way in which Kalamity's mother is often seen in image with a nose flowing with blood. Certain fixed images come to act as totems for the past.

The incredible thing about this piece is the way in which a whole world is built off of a collection of maybe ten memories, and imaginings into the past. That such a rich world can be rendered of of such sparse content is a reaffirming statement to us all I think - that what we remember is enough to know our stories in the way we need to know them.

As always tons more to say.

Light

Post forthcoming tomorrow

Dear folks,

I've got a massive headache and can't look at my computer screen now long enough to post. My apologies. I will upload my post tomorrow as early as possible.

Light,
mia

"It's enough to drive you crazy." (But in the best way possible)

I think about the statement that Elmaz made last week during class. She asserted that the best map we can to read a graphic memoir is the one the author gives us in the work itself - if we pay attention to the strategies employed in language and image. I want to suggest that one of the keys to understanding Are You My Mother is offered to us on page 31 where Bechdel shares an excerpt of a letter she received in her early twenties from her mother, which says:

"I dream about brain tumors and babies. I am staring out my dirty windows at the lilac buds. Now I am trying to analyze why I put those two things together. Why do you and I do that. Patterns are my existence. Everything has significance. Everything must fit. It's enough to drive you crazy."

Through Are You My Mother, Bechdel in a sense invites us, into an encounter with the ways in which she has constructed narratives to hold her sometimes precarious sense of the world together - by forming connections and patterns in life, and then in the text, where everything is given significance, everything is made to fit. Here we encounter her genius/madness, and its live unraveling - in her relationship with her mother, the process of writing both Fun Home and Are You My Mother, her intimate partnerships, and through therapy. The problem of this text, and the impetus to draw patterns out seems to stem from the Bechdel's feeling that:

"this memoir about my mother... has no beginning... Sort of like how I'd understood human reprofuction as a child. I was an egg inside my mother when she was still an egg inside her mother and so forth." (6-7)

As such this piece is in many senses about Bechdel's process of differentiation from her mother and towards herself, which requires the unwinding of the innumerable filaments that both bind Bechdel to her mother and stand in the way of their connection. The way in which Bechdel's mother "looms ... in her psyche" is demonstrated through the first many, many pages of the memoir where we have various examples of the ways in which Bechdel wrestles with the internal voice that prohibits her progress. This is a strong set-up which is followed-through again and again through the piece.

So... thinking about the idea that bridging all of the disparate pieces of complex life together into some coherent pattern is "enough to drive you crazy" (but is precisely what Bechdel needs in order to differentiate), it seems an ironic, comic, (likely/deeply) intentional, and intelligent choice that Bechdel makes to structure the piece in a sense (at least to page 141 which is where my reflection currently ends) as one long therapy session. This creative strategy gives this unfolding narrative/s a central core, where they all fit, and can all make some kind of sense... Because in the space of therapy, where theoretically the absolute opening of the mind and heart towards healing takes place, disparate stories naturally emerge to be processed, and it is through processing these stories that we discover the patterns around which we build our sense of the world, and who we are in it.

Bechdel uses the frame of her sessions with Jocelyn and Carol to eventually hold all of the stories that are told. One powerful example of this can be found on page 129. Bechdel has been recounting the process of transcribing the letters her father wrote to her mother around the time her mother had conceived. Bechdel writes about a number of poems her mother composed at this time. In the narration Bechdel reflects:

"As far as I know, these were the last poems she would write for the next forty years." And then seamlessly within the same panel draws us back into a therapy session with Carol where Bechdel states

"Anyway, she's nervous about what I've written, and so am I."

The reader gets the sense through very precise moments like this in the text that everything we have read has been part of an ongoing conversation.

The way in which Bechdel on this same page (again 129) maps her theraputic process with with Carol onto her theraputic process with Jocelyn reinforces the sense of continuity of the story, both as she has dealt with it over life and as we encounter it in the text - and is this despite (and) heightened by the fact that Bechdel says "starting from scratch with a new therapist" was "frustrating." The genius of this moment is that through mentioning the "code" of the "plexiglass dome" used with Jocelyn, and defining it for Carol, Bechdel builds intimacy with the reader, letting us also into the code, and opens the story back into her childhood. The cadence of the retelling is as though she is speaking to Carol. An interesting moment of transference can be said to happen here (and throughout the text) where the reader becomes therapist witness.

(As an connected aside, the phone calls Bechdel has with her mother have a similar structural impact on the piece as the meetings with Carol and Jocelyn - they are particularly powerful for the way in which they are rendered so realistically, where her mother's stream of consciousness monologue introduces stories that Bechdel then transitions us into exploring. Another device to bring the disparate into relationship.)

There are other unique strategies that Bechdel uses to give this piece a centre. For example, she litters this piece with clues and cues, that build up the environment and story around us, sometimes in sneaky ways that help us to develop a subconscious familiarity with content and image. One example of this the red dress. The red dress initially appears on page 30. Bechdel is depicted holding what looks like a red and white striped rag. Much later in the text (page 109) we learn that this is one of Bechdel's childhood dresses. It is likely that many readers may not hold conscious memory of this dress appearing earlier in the text when it finally returns, but there is a subliminal impact, we feel like we know the place or the thing, which opens us more fully to the theoretical and emotional explorations that Bechdel leads us on.

When we finally encounter the red dress - it acquires profound meaning in relationship to the narrative. Bechdel is confronted in a sense through this dress with the complexity of her relationship to her mother. It appears across the page from Alice Miller's theory on the impact of emotional abandonment by parents on their children, and is vested with huge emotional weight as Bechdel recognizes the material "evidence of [her] mother's care" which she finds wrenching upon examining the patch her mother carefully applied. Another relateable transitional object which become invested with deepening layers of meaning throughout the text is Beezum, the stuffed bear.

Bechdel uses a distinctly circular approach to storytelling, and this helps to tie the individual pieces together, quite cinematically. An example of this is through the introduction of stories that seem told to completion in their initial rendering, but that are then busted open as Bechdel circles into back story which provides us with deeper and more hard hitting emotional context. One example of this is the story Bechdel tells on page 137 of her mother informing when she is 7 years old that she is too old to be kissed goodnight. As stands in it's first telling the emotional impact is weighty and a great deal seems to be revealed about the family dynamic and the particular relationship between Bechdel and her mother. But when Bechdel makes the link between (draws a pattern to) that transformation in her relationship with her mother to her mother's the discovery of "gynecological fantasy" Bechdel had drawn the day earlier we start to see perhaps the more underlying issues at hand. When this story is placed beside the story her mother tells of her initial bout of depression in her twenties setting on due to the combination of over work and the disclosure a friend makes regarding a queer crush, we start to understand everything with even more clarity... We start to see the way in which the sexual repression and rejection forged huge distance between Bechdel and her mother from an incredibly young age.

This is already hella long so I'm going to just talk about one more piece, the collage pages that show up intermittently throughout the text. Bechdel's form is not completely consistent throughout this piece and I think that is reflective of her striving to pull divergent different pieces into relationship to form a coherent whole, which can't always happen in the space of rigid panels; precisely because she is exploring how stories/themes/images/totems (one small example being the number 11) cross and are layered on top of each other. These pages offer a kind of chaotic relief, where we can see how things sit together. Let's just take pages 132-133 as an example. Here a drawing done by Bechdel as a child depicting her "perfect environment" where she was attempting to "go-on-being without disruption" is placed in relationship to a letter from Bechdel's father to her mother, beside a poem that her mother wrote around the time of her conception, on top of which sit Bechdel's glasses and atop which the largest text is theory written by Winnicot. This panel can be read as Bechdel's attempt (through her glasses) to see the interconnections between the "false-identity" of her father, her own mother's isolation and creative suppression (she wouldn't write poems for 40 years after this) producing Bechdel's need for safety and unconditional love and attention, in conversation with something much broader than her individual lived experience - Winnicott's research. So these pages don't only represent Bechdel's desire to draw the patterns for herself, but to in a sense make/draw attention to how her life and these perhaps regular stories hold greater symbolic meaning, as Virginia Wolf did.

So much more to say...

To close, while doing all of the work she does to draw convincing patterns in a complicated life, I think Bechdel is also self-reflexive in moments and reveals the possibility that the narratives she has written perhaps don't always hold perfectly... Demonstrating perhaps as Thomas King asserts, that "The truth about stories is that that's all we are."

But I Can't

I was left kind of speechless once I finished reading this piece due to how moved I was, and how deeply I resonated with the story the writer tells. Not just because obsession with extra-terrestrial visitations/abductions formed much of my own childhood and adolescence for the influence of a parent (who didn’t run away but wanted to)… but that’s another story.

In this reflection I’m in part interested to explore how the writer uses different renderings of the human body to convey emotion and information.

Let’s start here:

The first image of Harriet appears after a photo of her mother. Immediately drawing the strong connection between the two as both are depicted with their eyes shifting to the right. This, juxtaposed against the panel where the narrator as a child is looking directly at her mother heightens our sense of Harriet’s loss. This is again emphasized when the narrator says, “Her [Harriet’s] father wasn’t exactly there for her either” accompanied by a depiction of her father’s back walking out of a door, the wind blowing his hair. He seems untouchable. The narrator doesn’t tell us how Harriet felt about this, the images implying absence communicate this perhaps more powerfully than words might.

I’m also interested in the unique layering of panels on page two. The placement of Harriet’s research, beside the panel of them together at school, beside the panel depicting the low fi receptor, beside the active research in Harriet’s bedroom, beside the panel where Harriet looks longingly out into the sky. The action within these panels demonstrates how deeply intertwined these two girls were – in life and in imagination – and how strong Harriet’s internal world influenced the world of the narrator. Further these panels give us a sense of how all encompassing this obsession became for Harriet. They are together in Harriet’s imagination at school and at home, their worlds become consumed. Harriet’s longing for her mother, which pulls her away from the world and into the world of the imaginary is powerfully conveyed in the fact that she is in every panel looking away from the reader and towards something somewhere else – that we can never see.

On page two as Harriet and the narrator are walking at school Harriet’s shadow seems to be such a pronounced element of the panel. This seems as though it can act as a gesture towards her growing obsession with the occult

Even when Harriet and the narrator are together, Harriet’s isolation is highlighted by the way in which the two never meet one another’s eyes, even when they finally do face one another on page three –  as Harriet shows the narrator her photos from inside the ship. Their distance and Harriet’s own isolation is heightened by the intensely eager need for connection and affirmation conveyed in the way in which her face is depicted in this panel – which also gives us a sense of her spiral away from consensual reality.

The top panels on page three have a certain element of chaos and distortion perhaps mirroring the narrator’s sense of what Harriet’s internal world must have felt like as she went “walking out of town at night” performing “strange esoteric rituals, possibly satanic.”

The writer uses a curious and powerful strategy to convey the narrator’s sense of connection to, responsibility for and sadness surrounding Harriet’s disappearance by depicting her in blue-grey – very similar to the green-grey used to depict Harriet in the missing ad in the local paper. In making this choice the writer succinctly demonstrates the way in which they have both in a sense entered the unknown. The way in which both are now lost.

A deeply melancholic grief and longing are conveyed by the three panels at the top of page four which depict open empty landscapes, where the grasses are shifted in the direction of the breeze.

This story ultimately is about the narratives we adopt in the face of grief – narratives that sometimes have the potential to save us, or, consume us, when we are left without proper witness and support. This is punctuated by the way in which the narrator in a sense adopts Harriet’s own theory about her mother’s disappearance, but applies it to Harriet’s own, as she closes the story with the statement, “Still; sometimes I lay awake at night trying to believe.”

Anchoring the Reader in the Collapsing Ship of Time, or The Genius of the Transition.

Dear folks,

1)    This is HELLA long. I’m sorry.

2)    That is because there is a LOT to explore here.

3)    So much so that I am trying to focus on one specific element.

4)    But even in doing this I am getting distracted.

5)    Here goes…

The genius of Bechdel’s Fun Home I would argue rests firmly in her mastery over the art of transition.

I am going to analyze part of Chapter 5 to demonstrate what Bechdel is doing with transitions – from start to finish throughout this entire graphic memoir with (in some places brief) reference to other moments within the text where she is applying these same methods.

Bechdel opens each chapter with a declarative statement that recollects the story that she has been drawing, reminding us of where we have been, and the clues we have been offered to piece together the truth of her father’s story, and the truth of her own story. These declarative statements also function as clues and questions that unfold throughout the chapters, offering ever-deepening reflections and understandings of the story, as she herself discovers it.

Chapter 5 opens with Bechdel stating “I have suggested that my father killed himself, but it’s just as accurate to say that he died gardening. He’d been clearing brush from the yard of an old farmhouse he was planning to restore.” (89)

Bam. In these two sentences:

• We are (still) firmly fixed on her father’s death.

• We are reminded of her father’s preoccupation with and need for tight control over appearances, the restoration of “dead things,” and these as symptoms of the artifice and dualism with(in) which he lived; his “preference of a fiction to reality.” (85)

• We learn something new about him, his affinity for botanical endeavors, which extends the previous constructions of his character, and which quickly opens into an evaluation of how Bechdel’s father performed his sexuality and the way in which he utilized artifice to obscure it.

What Bechdel demonstrates here in this short space is her circular approach to storytelling. I explore in greater detail below how transitions assist this.

On page 92, Bechdel re-introduces us to Proust’s writings and elements of his personal story. She reminds us that as she earlier mentioned Proust in the text, “My father, as I say, had begun reading this [The Remembrance of Things Past] the year before he died.” (Another example of circling back.)

The writing of Proust in this chapter, (as the myth of Icarus and Daedalus, in Chapter 1, Camus’ A Happy Death and the Myth of Sisyphus, and the Adams Family in Chapter 2, works by Fitzgerald, Shakespeare, James and Wallace in Chapter 4, and on) is introduced as an allegory that serves as the focal point around and against which Bechdel’s narrative of her father’s story, and her own, are unwoven, unveiled, and reconstructed throughout the rest of chapter. In this sense, Proust in this chapter (as other elements of popular culture, literature, philosophy, historical events, or mythology in other chapters) is established as a thematic anchor to which we return time and again. Using this technique, Bechdel is able to weave the reader through time and across events while suturing together what would otherwise be vast confusing gaps in story, neatly fortifying each jump with emphasis on the major theme of exploration.

Right so back to analysis…

On page 92, Bechdel writes, “If my father had a favorite flower, it was the Lilac. A tragic botanical specimen invariably beginning to fade even before reaching its peak.”

Quoting Proust on the Lilac she writes: “only a week before they had still been breaking in waves of fragrant foam, these were now spent and shriveled and discolored, a hollow scum, dry and scentless.” (92) Placing this description in contrast to her own father’s preference for the Lilac, Bechdel foreshadows the way in which her father’s stories would quickly fall apart. She utilizes Proust to open the discussion on her father’s passion for gardening as an exploration of his sexuality. “After the Lilac passage, Proust describes Swann’s garden in a feat of both literary and horticultural virtuosity that climaxes in the narrator’s rapturous communion with the pink blossom of the Hawthorn Hedge.” (93) Most literally introducing the way in which the garden became a site of seduction for her father. Then writing, “If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.” (93)

Transition: “Proust would have intense emotional friendships with fashionable women… but it was with young often straight men with whom he fell in love.”

Bechdel uses Proust as a foil by depicting below the narration visual interactions with Roy, one of his young male lovers.

Using the device of the garden Bechdel opens up from pages 94 – 96 an exploration of how her father “cultivated these young men like orchids” tying this into an conversation on the way in which gender played out within her family, with focus on her father’s masculinity and his enforcement of particular forms of femininity onto her. With great zooming in on specific detailed incidents ie. the barrette Bechel demonstrates that “despite the tyrannical power with which he held sway, it was clear to me that my father was a big sissy.”

Then page 97 Bechdel brings us back to Proust, this time to zoom out quickly and offer us a more universal analysis of what was happening between father and daughter. “Proust refers to his explicitly homosexual characters as “inverts”… As a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex… In the admittedly limited sample comprising my father and me, perhaps it is sufficient.”

And with this statement she circles back to the theme and then jumps us “five years later” continuing the exploration of the way in which she and her father were “inversions of one another.” Again in the next panel jumping us “seven years after that” to another moment reinforcing this dynamic where her father says “You can’t go out to dinner like that. You look like a missionary.” What is holding us together through these transitions is adherence to the theme. And within each of these transitions something new about the dynamic between father and daughter is being revealed.

On page 99 Bechdel writes about the “slender demilitarized zone” that existed between herself and her father, during her years as a teenager, their “shared reverence for masculine beauty.” The last two panels on this page depict Bechdel holding a magazine with an image of a man, chest bare, reclining.

Using a similar image the next two pages are a "centerfold" of sorts that circle back to where we have just been in the magazine, while transitioning us again in time to just after her father’s death. In this panel Bechdel has discovered a nearly nude photo of Roy (her babysitter/the garden hand) taken by her father. In exploration of this photo Bechdel introduces the vacation that they went on with Roy to NYC when she was 8 (foreshadowing the next transition). Bechdel notices the way in which the year is blotted out of this photo writing:

“In an act of prestidigitation typical of the way my father juggled his public appearance and private reality, the evidence is simultaneously hidden and revealed.” (101) In this statement Bechdel both forming an analysis of her father’s actions and is circling us back to Proust who we reencounter on the following page, poignantly with the quote, “the two ways are revealed to converge – to have always converged – through a vast network of transversals.”

Bechdel then ingeniously utilizes this quote and transitions us to the trip to NYC she has introduced in the “centerfold” via a literal "network of transversals," an under river highway tunnel.

In the following pages Bechdel does the following:

1)    Introduces us to Bleeker Street where her mother lived in NYC hearkening back to her parents young adulthood

2)    Takes us on a walk through NYC with Roy

3)    Notices frenetic energy in the air in NYC and traces that to Stonewall

*Illuminating the theme of sexuality (both her’s and her father’s)

4)    Rounds us back to Proust in this meditation on NYC and her parents young adulthood wondering what had attracted her father to her mother “Had he somehow conflated her with her address like Proust’s narrator had with Gilberte and the garden? and we reconnect with our anchor

5)    Then circles us back to her mother’s NYC apartment

6)    Which opens into Bechdel’s own stay in New York post graduation from university

7)    Introducing historical information on lesbian culture in the 1950s

8)    Circling us back now to her father’s sexual deviation as she wonders what she would have done as a “Eisenhower-era butch… Would I have married and sought succor from my high school students?”

9)    Which lands us back in Bechdel’s 12 year-old body sitting at the table with her father reflecting on his copy of Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe the name of which eventually was translated to Within a Budding Grove which “shifts the emphasis from the erotic to the botanical. But of course as proust himself so lavishly illustrates eros and botany are pretty much the same thing” (109). As was the case with her father - which is where we started this whole chapter.

10) And I’ll leave it here where Bechdel depicts her father reading a gardening magazine “Wayside Gardens” and then capitalizes on the word budding to introduce her own sexual maturation.

There is so much more to say, but here’s the point of everything I’m writing.

1)    In using literary examples (ie. in chapter 3) as allegories for her family’s stories, Bechdel is able to collapse time and information. This strategy permits her to place emphasis on only the most vital details of her family’s stories allowing readers to fill in the details while riding the allegories and allowing her to hone in keenly on the focus she wants us to keep our eyes on. This strategy successfully constructs an intricately dynamic world enveloping and holding the reader.

2)    Her use of transitions establishing narrator authority. Bechdel offers these anchors up as the familiar ground to which we as readers return. Bechdel always reminds us where we have started from and explodes our world open from there. As a result the reader is effortlessly drawn from one rounding corner to the next and she is able to drive the story in different directions with such specific detail and commitment to theme it boggles the mind.

3)    Lastly, and in commitment to her (I think ultimate) theme of recovery, through these strategies Bechdel is constantly pointing our attention towards the way in which everything, every story is interwoven – in the way it builds up artifice and in the way that artifice crumbles. In her economy of writing, no stories sit independent of one another but rather each illuminate the other, the hidden and unspoken, until the light is so bright we can barely see. Bechdel in her use of transitions succeeds in creating a matrix around the reader so engaging, that we do not stop to question the untold pieces – the world is drawn with such fullness.

Ok I hope my point carried.

Looking forward to the conversation.

The Impostor's Daughter

Among other things, The Impostor’s Daughter is a story about identity, family, betrayal, and the acts we take to survive things that we cannot comprehend; the inheritances we bear. It is a story about a woman excavating the truth of her father’s life, unweaving her family’s creation narrative, and in so doing, unweaving and reconstructing herself.

I am glad to have read it. These are some of my reflections.

“I wondered what made him guard the mail so jealously. His explanations didn’t make sense,” writes Sandell of the way in which her father stopped mail delivery to their family’s home each time he went out town. In these introductory words on the first page of Secrets, the first chapter of The Impostor’s Daughter, Sandell begins to draw for the reader a map of the relational dynamic that exists/ed between herself and her father, her father, and their family as a whole; a relational dynamic of painful and damaging cognitive dissonance. She establishes immediately (some of) the compelling central questions that this memoir grapples with: What happens when we learn to live in and accept a state of discomfort with the truths we structure our lives by? What is the truth? How do we find it? What costs is the truth worth? 

This active cognitive dissonance presents itself repeatedly throughout the story. Some examples include:

1) The drawings that Sandell produced of and for her father as a child wherein he is represented in a deeply unflattering manner. These drawings represented a mechanism through which Sandell communicated her pent up awareness of the disconnects that existed between how reality was framed by her father and what she felt internally to be truth, while simultaneously holding him as a larger than life, super heroic figure.

2) The way in which she is instructed by her father, multiple times throughout the, to construct her identity separate of her actual events and/or accomplishments (as he did). For example the incident where Sandell’s father applies a series of badges that she has not earned to her brownie sash replies, “Ay hija, you did earn them” (17) when she questions her legitimate right to wear them. Adopting against her internal compass the possibility that “Perhaps I had earned them.” (17)

I want to take a moment to explore this moment in particular as it stands out as perhaps the first time she Sandell is perfectly conscious of the way in which her father constructs alternate realities, and simultaneously illuminates the way in which she did not know how to fight back against this act. This moment begins to heighten narrative tension and a sense of what is at stake for Sandell in her own self-creation and sense of truth.

This incident is gestured to later in the story (and given deeper meaning) when Sandell talks about her father’s “green barn jacked decorated with a constellation of pins and medals: an American flag, a Purple Heart, the skull and crossbones of the Special Forces” on page 65. This moment happens during the months of interviews that she conducts with her father about his life and based on the reveals provides a powerful punctuation to the lies upon which his stories are founded, and also the depth of his shame.

3) Sandell’s mother instructing her father to take his verbal and physical assaults of Sandell to the basement. This is powerfully demonstrated through the panels on page 32 where Sandell’s mother is depicted as contentedly connecting with closed eyes to the music while her daughter simultaneous experiences abuse immediately below her.

This seems to be an eerie revelation about the ways in which the truth lurked always just below the surface of this family’s narrative. And the ways in which business carried on as usual in its midst.

4) When depicted beside her father, or in reference to him, Sandell’s face often communicates uncertainty, fear, nervousness and discomfort. Yet this is couched beside statements like, “As long as he was there, I felt safe.” (28)

5) As Sandell gets starts to get closer to the truth of her father’s lies her insomnia begins. If I am to psychologize this for a moment, this was perhaps her body’s way of saying “wake up and stay awake to the truth!” And it works successfully as a narrative tool to demonstrate the way that she could not. Her sleeping pill addiction then becomes another attempt to stay that feeling – of engaging in cognitive dissonance “I secretly believed there was a possibility he was telling the truth. Really I didn’t want to know. The stories kept our relationship intact. To be honest they were keeping me intact.” (71-72)

6) And then there are the reflective statements that pound the fact home: “All of the women in my father’s life seemed to close their eyes.” (160)

7) I had a recurring feeling of emptiness each time Sandell made a revelation to her family regarding their father’s lies. The empty feeling was a reaction to the deflated responses that these revelations seemed to engender. With this rendering (whether or not exaggerated) Sandell successfully underlines again her family’s adherence to a status quo that they would not disrupt.

There are many strategies that Sandell uses effectively to transmit to the reader her original lived experience of her father’s grandiosity, domination, and bizarre behaviour. Humor and exaggeration are two of these strategies. For example: “He maintained a library of 11,000 books. He’d read them all. Anything I wanted to know about, he simply walked over to a shelf, pulled a book down, then flipped it open to the exact page that showed his point.” He could “Identify every piece of classical music that ever existed.” And t he appearance of a mouse wearing gas mask in reference to her father’s home improvement projects, page 34.

Her use of humor in images and text serves to also break up the weight of the reveals of information she makes.

In terms of structure, the story remains for the first ¾ locked on the relationship between father and daughter. Even seeming sojourns away from that narrative arrive us back to another unfolding of the dynamic, another discovery, another shift in the poles of the relationship, and eventually a greater and greater commitment to an unraveling of the untruths that structure her family’s life. The relative quiet of other members of Sandell’s family within this text are a repeated and intentional gesture to emphasize how all consuming the relationship between father and daughter truly was. Heightening the reader’s sense of incredible effort Sandell required to break herself away from that relationship and those stories.

Like a quintessential “Who Done It” mystery, Sandell keeps us in the action of investigation from the very beginning of the piece. She keeps the camera zoomed always on her, and all events take place through her eyes. This is illuminated by the fact that she shows up in nearly every panel, and the way in which the telling of the story rests largely in past tense recounting. In this way Sandell is asserting ultimate control over the act of narrating the story, which is in part I believe what she required for catharsis. This also keeps the narrative tight and the reader drawn closely into the story. There are so many opportunities for digression and exploration of the experiences of others within this piece, but the true power in her storytelling strategy – which I think allows for the central questions to be asked most closely – is Sandell’s commitment to holding the story to her, and through her experience. One of the key ways in which this subtly happens is through Sandell’s use of maps and explanatory labeling. ie. the map on the first page identifying who is who, repeated again at the rehab centre on page 211. Tools like this reinforce Sandell as the expert. They serve to invite us into her world – us as the tourists her as the tour guide. Cementing authorial control.

There is an organic irony that emerges in this story that also has symbolic value. A great deal of the dialogue that happens are transactions that take place over the phone. This is a (perhaps unintentional) gesture towards the game of telephone, which models the way in which distortion of stories takes place from teller to teller. The ironic reversal that happens in this story is that the telephone becomes in many ways the tool of discovery and unpacking of distorted truths.

Despite her pain and her need to hold a tight narrative in this piece, Sandell allows her father to have complication as a character. We are given the opportunity to witness him as a man so emasculated by his impoverished upbringing, neglectful parents, his sense of failure, that he felt compelled to construct false identities in order to live up to a dominant construction of masculinity. This is at least one possible reading that can be applied. When read in this way there is an interesting underlying (perhaps unintentional) commentary on class as it intersects with patriarchy and the impact on women – what women are asked/forced to hold as a result of these interlocking systems of oppression.

There is one image in particular that remains with me strongly and I want to close my reflection by examining it. On page 185, post Sandell’s first conversation with her father in more than 2 years, she crosses from her mother’s car into a train. This moment is a pivotal turning point in the story. Sandell’s mother has just told her, “I’m glad you outed him, Laurie. Because I don’t care who he is. I still love him.” This “proof positive” that her family was not going to change, and demand and live by the truth in a sense frees Sandell in this moment to finally come to terms with the fact that they were no longer the ones who needed to change. That she was not dependent on them to live by the truth. This crossing over into the train symbolizes that shifting of Sandell’s narrative, the separating of her identity from that of her father, of walking into her self, of taking responsibility for what narratives structured her self-knowing, and how these narratives arranged her life. The pages preceding in this chapter provide an heightened visible wrestling with questions of familial loyalty, betrayal, self-determination, honesty, and the act of fighting for the truth, which raises the stakes in relationship to the choice that Sandell makes at the end of the chapter.

The rest of the book is a continual unfolding towards that.

In many ways this story leaves us with a question to ask ourselves, personally, and as a society. If in the small complex of a family structure like that of the Sandells, such untruths can serve as the foundation upon which one’s framework of seeing oneself and the world, then: what are the lies that we have based our own identities and beliefs upon, and what are the costs of allegiance to these lies? In what ways do we numb ourselves to the irritating scratches that enter our psyches, and stomachs, our hearts, and our spirits, suggesting that perhaps the world in which we live is not quite what we believe it to be? And are we willing to invest in the courageous costs of shaking off that dissonance loose?

So much more to say, but I’ll leave it here.