his early relationship with Bechdel’s mother. He begins to passionately confess his love in his letters, declaring, “I love you, I love you, you crazy wonderful girl” (63). Through his reading her father discovers a way of life and thought that attracts him. In his writing, he attempts to mold his identity within this image.
By analyzing her parent’s reading choices in relation to their own
lives, Bechdel discovers an almost cyclic nature in the way these fictions and realities affect each other. She suggests that her parents are attracted to books in which they can find comparisons to their own lives. As they read, they make the text uniquely special to themselves by subjecting the unalterable print to these personal connections. Conversely, through showing the transformations in his writing, Bechdel makes clear how her father changes his own behaviors and views in reaction to his reading. The characters change their reading of the text to fit their own lives, and simultaneously change their lives to fit the text, making fiction and reality one and the same.
Characters in the novel use reading in order to reinforce and change
certain facts and truths about themselves, but they also use reading in order to understand these truths in a way that they would not be able to on their own. In the novel, as Alison becomes aware of her sexuality, we see how reading aids her in the way she sees and understands this facet of herself.
Becoming sexually aware is a slow and almost universally confusing
experience. It’s a facet of our lives that remains completely private, absent from any kind of formalized education. We are left to figure it out, essentially, on our own. Alison recounts how, “in a manner consistent with my bookish upbringing” (74) she dealt with this experience by turning to books for help. The image of a dictionary page highlighted with certain terms appears again and again in the novel, in an attempt to show the way in which Alison went about making sense of complicated concepts in her life. The use of a dictionary is especially helpful as Alison first begins to ask questions about her sexuality. As a youngster, we see her make sense of her first physi42 Excellence in First-Year Writing 2012