Hold on Holden

  As I read Fun Home, I found myself thinking, what does Alison Bechdel feel about her father and her family in general? On the surface, the abundance of comments such a s “I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children and his children like furniture” (14) or "He used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not" (16) makes it clear that she doesn’t like him personally—but he still means a lot to her, and his story is an important part of hers, or well, she wouldn’t center the book around her family and him so much.  Yet, she also feels like something was missing from her life because of him, which makes it seem like the biggest feeling she felt towards him was distance. She mentioned “his shame inhabited our house as pervasively and invisibly as the aromatic musk of aging mahogany” (20) to convey how much he tried to hide from her and the rest of the family. She also said, "He really was there all ...

     One thing I found myself thinking about as I read The Bell Jar was, when did this all start? In the beginning, I was feeling the same confusion and disappointment. Ester was feeling her lack of enthusiasm and joy during her internship. It was obvious from the beginning that something had already gone really, really wrong. Ester didn’t know about chemical imbalances or any of the other “modern-day" scientific analyses of what causes shifts in mental health. Now, most readers can identify her depression as a pathological physical state of her body—something akin to POTS or Crohn's disease. Yet, there is a profound shift in her illness from the beginning to the end of the book that I don’t think can just be attributed to the momentum that poor physiology (especially mental illnesses, because those often make it extra hard to engage in behaviors that would help you get better) has.  It is certainly possible that there's no other reason for her descent into suicid...