Despite the length of this book, I breezed through it in a couple of days, often unable to stop reading until reaching the end of a long chapter. It’s a coming-of-age story of a Midwestern, middle-class girl who decides she wants to go to boarding school, gets some scholarships, and ends up in New England. Once there Lee realizes the class divide is more striking than she anticipated and spends the next four years in a constant and painful state of insecurity. Written from the perspective of Lee in her mid-twenties, it’s at times unbearable, as she seems so aware of her behavior and how it dominoes her into even worse scenarios. But of course, she’s looking back and analyzing. Few people, teenagers especially, are actually that self-aware in the moment.
All the same, it was the sort of book that I wanted a “happy” ending, showing how she rose above it all, and it’s not really happy or sad. Which I guess is pretty realistic.
Elegy
My body given away, parts
flown to other parts—a child
receives my eyes, another
my heart, the diseased organs
remain, benign now.
In death I am waiting
for my soul to arrive
that I may divide it equally
among frightened neighbors.
In death I pursue a man
younger than my father
ever was in my life.
In death I am a mother
who disowns her children
in a market parking lot.
In death a ghost lies
under me, pregnant. In death
I unbury myself and try
to extract my soul surgically;
it will not release, will not;
I discover there is no one else
this soul wishes to be.
The graphic novel memoir seems such an ideal form, especially as demonstrated in this “family tragicomic” where Bechdel uses snippets of journals and letters to flesh out the story of her relationship with her father, who is suspiciously killed by a truck four months after she comes out to her parents via a letter while she is away at college and two weeks after her mother asked him for a divorce. Through an oscillating narration, she weaves a story out of smaller stories, repeating elements and revealing details casually.
It’s the details in general that make this story so beautiful, from the aesthetic of her drawings to the pieces of literature and mythology entwined with her family’s tale.
This collection of personal essays dissects the house as home, meandering from room to room while simultaneously shifting between Busch’s personal experiences and more general ideas gleaned from history and literature. She doesn’t really succeed in placing her experiences into a comprehensive context, yet the book isn’t presented entirely in an anecdotal manner.
At times she seems to suggest some kind of universal Home experience, yet she is pretty much talking about a specific middle-to-upper class, suburban/rural demographic, perhaps more specifically the locales where she herself has lived. One of the few times she talked about urban homes, I felt that she was writing from assumption rather than experiences. From the chapter on porches:
While stoop sitting continues to be prominently featured in some TV sitcoms about inner-city life, it is more a convenient prop than a reflection of urban reality. Although stoops once served as a neighborhood’s outdoor living room, today the threat of drive-by shootings and the fear of random violence tend to empty them of people.
Which, from my experience living in a heavily stooped city, doesn’t ring true. Surely there are some neighborhoods in some cities where this is a fact, but it seems a bit unfair and misguided to declare stoops abandoned even so.
All the same this made me think a lot about homes and how we live in them, if anything to note to myself how much things are different in urban areas from what Busch describes. It was rather like The Future of Nostalgia in that way, being really interesting but not quite the focus I may have put on it myself.
I loved Sonja’s first book Temper, Temper, though I never tried reading it straight through. I did so with this one, and it was most rewarding. While it feels a bit square to page-by-page, as it’s rather like reading a sketchbook, there are threads that get carried through and themes that build on each other. And you can be sure that you won’t inadvertently miss something in flipping and skimming. Hilarious, brilliant, cut & pasted photocopy art utilizing incredibly lovely handwriting and bunny imagery.
» You can look at samples of both books on make it awesome (where you can also commission handmade “fierce” bunnies).
From the author of The Time Traveler’s Wife, she calls this a “visual novel” and/or “a silent film made from Japanese prints.” The story is of three sisters torn apart when two fall for the same dude, told in aquatints and spare text. Some of my favorite pages are those that don’t obviously pull the story along—i.e., “A few days later; Clothilde practices levitation at breakfast.” It’s impressive though how much emotive detail the story has considering its format. The illustrations are lovely: all muted and melancholy.
Elissa told me she’s bought several copies of this book, as she did once again while in town last week, leaving it with me to read when she left. An appropriate choice for Easter weekend, it follows the story of Mariette, a young postulant of the Sisters of the Crucifixion in the early 1900s. Shortly after arriving at the priory, she begins experiencing ecstasies—or perhaps is just showing off and trying to draw attention to herself.
The structure of the book is finely tuned, with the poetically fragmented descriptions of setting that funnel into the narrative cleanly, interspersed with excerpts of interviews between the priest and sisters about Mariette. A quietly suspenseful novel.
I loved the concept of this book but eventually had to accept that it was a bit more academic than I wanted it to be. But that enabled me to just skip to the parts I wanted to read instead of feeling like I had to read every word. That may sound like a lackluster recommendation, but I’m sure to return to this book and skim again.
Nostalgia, like progress, is dependent on the modern conception of unrepeatable and irreversible time. The romantic nostalgic insisted on the otherness of his object of nostalgia from his present life and kept it at a safe distance. The object of romantic nostalgia must be beyond the present space of experience, somewhere in the twilight of the past or on the island of utopia where time has happily stopped, as on an antique clock. At the same time, romantic nostalgia is not a mere antithesis to progress; it undermines both a linear conception of progress and a Hegelian dialectical teleology. The nostalgic directs his gaze not only backward but sideways, and expresses himself in elegiac poems and ironic fragments, not in philosophical or scientific treatises. Nostalgia remains unsystematic and unsynthesizable; it seduces rather than convinces.
