connections as a form of research that aid in her attempts to understand the people and events around her.
In certain statements, Alison seems to suggest that her parent’s liter-
ary tastes are based on the comparisons they find between the text and their own lives. When recounting how her mother chose to hold on to a certain poem by Wallace Stevens instead of giving it away, Alison wonders why the poem was so special to her mother. She first offers its Catholic themes as the reason, but then goes on to hypothesize, “Perhaps she also liked the poem because its juxtaposition of catastrophe with a plush domestic interior is life with my father in a nutshell” (83). Similarly, she wonders about her father’s interest in Fitzgerald’s writing. “I think what was so alluring to my father about Fitzgerald’s stories was their inextricability from Fitzgerald’s life . . . such a suspension of the imaginary in the real was, after all, my father’s stock in trade” (65). She sees her father’s interest as stemming from the way his and Fitzgerald’s views of reality mirrored one another. Through these two examples, Alison theorizes that her parents liked the reading material that they did largely due to the extent to which the characters or concepts were related to themselves and their realities.
The many aspects of Fitzgerald’s life and writing that have obvious
parallels in her father’s life may have held much interest for him, but we can also see in his letters his attraction to the ideas Fitzgerald presents that he finds foreign. He is impressed by the outrageous drunken adventures that Fitzgerald and his wife partake in. To him, their actions make them appear to be “pathetic, fabulous, mediocre geniuses” (62). He wants to be like them by engaging in that kind of behavior. He writes to Bechdel’s mother, “I want you and I to go on a roaring drunk. I want to wake up somewhere not knowing how I got there like [Zelda and Gatsby] did in Brussels” (65). Her father also takes note of the extremely romantic language Fitzgerald used in the courtship of his wife during his own stint in the Army. Her father sees the parallel in his situation and seeks to emulate this zealous romanticism in Excellence in First-Year Writing 2012 41