A Father-Daughter Relationship
As Alison describes her story throughout the book, she emphasizes the significance of her and her father's complicated relationship. However, I wanted to talk about the idea of how even as she describes her relationship with her father as negative, she then states how "he was there to catch me when I leapt" (Bechdel 230). Throughout the book, I always saw her father impacting her in only negative ways, pushing her down, providing her a childhood of neglect, and only delaying her coming of age and ability to find her identity. However, it actually seems that it wasn't necessarily the case at all. In many instances throughout the story, Alison talks about how her father's life was " a narrative of injustice, of sexual shame and fear, of life considered expendable" (Bechdel 196). She looks down on her father because of his fear to live his life, his cowardice, his lack of strength to express and strive for the life he wanted rather than suppressing his iden