Lyrics

 

There’s something I miss about all the people I left behind

As the faces start to blur, I feel better given time

I can’t the house my father built out of my mind

I always figured it would be better to run than hide

 

Reflection

Putting my section of the class book together was the most fun I’ve had all term. I wrote my own song for it and interlaced it with some of the adventures my great-grandfather went on, while, hopefully, showing themes from The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls and Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Both memoirs helped me write and stretch the truth of my great-grandfather’s life. While it isn’t the best quality video, I found working with Imovie and youtube really interesting. I would recommend exploring digital tools on your own and watching youtube videos. English 250 really showed me how to handle stressful technological situations with calmness and the understanding that technology may mess up.

 

 

To find my Timeline search it in the side bar.

The ending of Fun Home really caught me by surprise. I hadn’t expected Bechdel to end the story right when I felt like one of the biggest parts was still being told, a large part of me wants to continue with Alison’s personal story. Now that I have finished the memoir, I can finally say that I don’t truly think that Fun Home was ever about Alison, at least, not about her, alone. Fun Home in my opinion seems like it is about the epiphanies of one half of the whole story, where Bechdel’s father doesn’t get to purposively put anything in about himself, the implication that I get is that it’s a privilege he gave up when he may have taken his own life. I think it’s a large part of the draw of the memoir, because we won’t ever get to hear the other half. Quite like a child yelling into a large, hollow canyon we can only hear unanswered questions repeat themselves off of the walls. In the memoir, it seems like the representations of truths for Alison and her father could free them, or destroy them. I’ve found, in my own life, that truth is very capable of both.

Bechdel seems to have a perfect memory, or perhaps her words are so easy to trust because of all the evidence behind each implication she presents. Regardless, I’ve found myself on the phone with my mother asking about things that I had always thought of as insignificant, such as,

“Do you remember when Dad used to play the Icarian Games with Patrick(my brother), and me?” Which would lead my mother to endlessly questioning me about what the hell the Icarian Games were. Having to console her attention-deficited thoughts, with,

“No I haven’t tried to fly off of any roofs lately. I’m talking about the game where parents put their children on their legs and hold their hands.” To which my mother exclaimed,

“Superman!!” Which was the name for the acrobatic position in my household. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to talk to my mother about my childhood without having to enter some conversation along the lines of, “Your father should have been there for you more.” Like many children, my father traveled as his main business. This left me with quite the contradiction to Bechdel’s childhood, while she felt trapped because of the looming spirits within her household; I often felt trapped because of all the spirits which chose not to loom within my own home. Sort of like an un-haunted house. I think Bechel’s own connections with her father actually made her closer with him, perhaps more so than her other siblings. She doesn’t seem to mention much of her sibling’s perspectives. That is something that I wondered the whole time while reading, what about the rest of the family? It leads me to thinking, is Bechdel trying to write a tragedy about the non-indicated consequences of never accepting who you are? Or is she just an artist trying to overcome her own life tragedies, endlessly trying to connect her life with her fathers, so that she doesn’t have to ever truly let him go?

It seems to me that most people view their homes in very different ways than others. For Alison Bechdel, I feel that home to her is a bittersweet memory. It’s like the home itself is her father’s greatest achievement, but she doesn’t feel comfortable there. In general, I don’t think she feels very comfortable with her father. I think her father was trying to teach his kids how to maintain, and build a home to their own specific liking. Alison didn’t ever seem interested in learning the lessons her father had to teach. I think this has a lot to do with her finding out about her father’s perversions. It’s like they share a very dark secret, that they knew could only hurt others, and themselves, if it were told. That seems to have destroyed the trust between them. I don’t know about most kids, but my father and I shared a secret sort of similar to this. It one hundred percent destroyed most of the trust that I had in him, and the big, ugly world. I think once you know something truly dark about someone you have to decide if you will keep the secret, and take on the personal burden, damaging your trust with others, or you have to tell it. Alison Bechdel choosing not to tell anyone probably messed with her brain, and gave her a lot of trust issues, which I think are easy to see, especially when she’s younger.

Bechdel’s mother just seems to be there, there’s not a real relationship and the reason for this, in my mind, is because if she built trust with her mother she would eventually have to tell her father’s secret. This is a heavy burden for a child to carry, and I think all the times that she leaves the house to be alone conveys the message that she doesn’t feel like she belongs there. She seems to have felt more comfortable at her dad’s grave then she did at her own childhood home. She definitely loved her father, but love is a complicated, messy thing for most. I think her young mind didn’t focus on much else than who she could trust. By college Bechdel had a girlfriend, and I think that was another secret that was hard to live with for her. Never really knowing who she was also comes through to me. In a way though, her father and her are a bit of the same in that regard. They both love the same sex, however, the manner in which her father tries to cover up his homosexuality probably made her feel ashamed of her own, not to mention the fact that her father’s lovers were teenaged. She felt that her family was like the Addam’s family, the burdens upon her shoulders seems to have cast a large, gothic shadow on her perspective. She delivers the facts as they are, very brazenly, and allows the reader to accept them or not, they’re just out in the open. I think this graphic novel may have really helped with her trust issues in that respect, because she no longer has to hide anything.

In its entirety the Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls seems to me like a story about children growing up in a particularly hostile environment, while learning how the world truly works. The biggest question that I have is, is their upbringing what made of the Walls’ children so successful in New York? Jeanette had been taking care of her siblings, and planning the family budget with Lori since she was a child. When Jeanette couldn’t find lunch or a place to fit in, as a seventh grader, she took on the job of editor of the Welch school paper. Jeanette might not have taken up the job if her parents hadn’t put her in such a precarious position. It also seems increasingly obvious to me that Rosemary may have bipolar disorder, explaining her manic states and mood swings. This untreated disorder would make all of her fits about “having to attend,” her job as a school teacher to provide seven hundred dollars a month to barely slide by on  make more sense to me. Rosemary never wanted to take a handout, and because of this it may have forced Jeanette and the other children to be more resourceful than they otherwise would have been. The problem with this theory is that if they were on welfare the children wouldn’t have had to be afraid of Rex taking the money that they would save for groceries and other such necessities, as they’d have food stamps instead of just money. Rex’s alcoholism also gets much worse once he is back around his family in Welsh, and at one particular low point, in my own words, he whores out his daughter in a bar to make money for alcohol and paying back the money he owed to the family. The whole time Rex just thinks that Jeanette can take care of herself, and Jeanette knows it too. Both parents are dismissive of the few sexual assaults that befell their daughter, raising the obvious question of, what might have happened to all the other children?

During winter break I was reading through my family history book, and there are a few interesting connections between what used to be expected of children in a poor family and the Glass Castle. My great-grandfather, Walt had to have a job to pay for attending his high-school, after coming from a small farmhouse in rural Utah. Education was the priority with his own parents, and the children were expected to attend and pay for their own. While attending to his studies, and taking on a part-time job he found time to bull ride and was able to attend college on a bull riding scholarship. It seems to me that this sort of fashion of having to pave your own way at the young age of 14, or 15 used to be considered normal for some families. Maybe the reason that we may view the Walls’ struggle so harshly, in terms of Rex and Rosemary, could just be our own privileged view of what a parent should be, and how they should act for and towards their children.

 

In parts one and two of the Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls there are a load of crude adventures, broken promises and evading of the law. Jeanette’s father, Rex speaks of building his family a true home to their likings, a glass castle. This seemed to instil an idea of chasing the dream of a home in their family. Did the Walls family leave the idea of home as an idea or dream to chase? In the beginning of the memoir we learn that Jeanette has settled down in New York with a husband and has a steady life compared to her childhood. Jeanette’s mother, Rose Mary seems to have continued to chase her dream and is digging through trash happily and when asked about her lifestyle she accuses Jeanette of being the one who has lived in an incorrect manner. Rose Mary seems to imply the idea of how society functions and why we should work so hard to keep it established in that way. In my opinion, Rose Mary seems to bring up the idea of what happiness we are willing to give up to keep the wheels of society turning.

As I continued to read I noted that Jeanette seems to tell the story in a sort of detached tone, like she is retelling it without a bias or just not asking for any pity. It’s like she is just giving us the facts of her childhood and small glimpses into how the characters actually feel about most of their given situations. With Rex and Rose Mary it seems like it was always about riding high when they were getting lucky and doing their best to survive when they weren’t. Money seems to always be the priority as Jeanette mentions while living in Las Vegas, “One night Dad had made an especially big score, he said it was time to start living like the high rollers we had become,”(32). Rex was choosing to squander the money he had made in just one or two nights on his family and alcohol instead of saving it. The Walls family is then catapulted to the gold-promised Battle Mountain where they fight to survive and remain in school, and then to Rose Mary’s inherited home where they live with open windows and drifters. Would the Walls have been better off to stop running? In all honesty I think that the children would be taken into child care. I don’t actually know anything about child care but it sounds awfully lonely and being separated from your siblings after being separated from your parents can break a child. I’m not sure if there is a clear answer on how the family would fair completely separated, but it seems that at least for Rose Mary there is solace in her dreams of surviving while doing whatever she wants when she wants.