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This book is a graphic novel. I love graphic novels — I loved Maus, and Persepolis — and I love the comic strip Alison Bechdel is known for, Dykes to Watch Out For, so it seemed like a natural fit. But I was still unprepared for how much this book resonated with me.

The book is really a memoir of her father, a closeted homosexual who died when she was 20 in what may or may not have been suicide. It was a family that seemed mostly to communicate through books and ideas while seeming unable to communicate their emotions. It’s clear that this book is both a continuation of that intellectual method of dealing with the world, and at the same time a deliberate attempt to confront the emotional confusion of a very complicated relationship.

In a way, graphic novels are like poetry, except that where a poem is a kind of snapshot (and yet also a kind of very short story), each panel of a graphic novel is its own snapshot. Rather than lay the whole story out in a linear fashion, Bechdel chooses to revisit it from a series of angles, almost as if she can only bear to go in so far before she has to retreat, or as if the truth is so tangled up that she starts out heading for the middle but ends up on the other side without really going all the way through.

On a level I can’t explain, that’s exactly right. I can never explain in one fell swoop who my mother was, what my relationship was with her, what my childhood was like and felt like. I can only chip it off in little pieces. Mine are poems (I tried prose and couldn’t bear it for very long so the rest would get flat, like I had already checked out); hers are cartoons. But the artistic grace of her panels is breathtaking. The layers of meaning — the depths behind the most mundane acts she shows — are sometimes heartbreaking. I read the book a couple of weeks ago and now it’s Aaron’s turn, but I keep going back and reading bits of it again.

More and more I find myself resisting works that are depressing, so why do I love this book so much? Because in the end, it is uplifting. Somehow by working her way through some of the muddle, Bechdel redeems her father to herself. As I reread the last two lines, they are still choking me up. Using the metaphor of Icarus, she says,

“He did hurtle into the sea, of course.

“But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I lept.”

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how you lose even what you most try to hold onto. As I continue to live on the West Coast and my parents get older and become less and less like the people I remember, I sometimes panic and feel like I am starting to lose them. Of course, I already lost my mother long ago, and some days it still hurts. But recently I have a revelation that I think is similar to what Bechdel is expressing in the lines I quoted.

In some ways, the parents I grew up with and loved are already gone. In their place are strangers whom it is my choice to get to know, which is what I am doing every week I call them on the phone.

But in some ways, I will always have those parents. They are locked away in my childhood, in my memories, in my heart. No one can ever take them away from me.

What are you most afraid to lose?

Is it already gone?

Isn’t it forever with you?

My friend C checked this out at the library, read it, loved it so much she bought it, and lent it to me. She said she thought of me the whole time she read it.

As soon as I started reading it, I said, Oh. This is why she wants me to read this. It’s perfect.

The subtitle is “Break through the blocks and win your inner creative battles.” But that’s even a little too abstract, too nice. I prefer the starkness of the title, because here’s the premise:

It’s a war.

If you’re not doing what you were born to do, creating what you were born to create, you’re losing.

But it’s OK. Because you’ll stop losing once you realize that the very resistance you are collapsing under is a sign that you’re on the right track. You just need to push through it instead of giving up.

You’ve already gotten the punch line of this blog entry, haven’t you? The punch line is why this blog entry even exists right now for you to be reading it. Yes, it’s because I finished the book and realized the only thing to do was to start writing. I was tempted to reread all the best parts, because it was so good. I was tempted to start a triumphant load of laundry. I was tempted to write an e-mail to C and tell her why I was glad she lent me the book. But I realized those were all resistance, too. What I really need to do is write the damn blog.

I have a lot of reasons not to blog. I don’t have time. I have serious concerns about what is and isn’t OK to write, first in a blog, second in a blog whose domain name makes it clear exactly who is writing. I haven’t written in a long time, therefore I will look ridiculous doing it now. People will wonder, “Is this for real this time or will she fade out like the other times and the other blogs she started?” My list of reasons goes on and on, in endless permutations and well-thought-out detail.

All of that is actually crap. I want to write. A lot. Preferably about myself. I have always wanted to write. Laura Ingalls Wilder was my great inspiration. The woman wrote plainly about the most mundane details of her life and it was all utterly fascinating because it was so clear and so different from our time and yet she was so human. I’ve dreamed my whole life of writing, not the Great American Novel, but the Great American Autobiography.

So here I am, showing up. I plan to continue to show up. It’s a guarantee that the works of Shakespeare will not appear here. (Actually, that would be plagiarism, so that’s a good thing.) But it actually doesn’t matter. I’m suddenly at the point where I would rather sling crap onto a Web page every day than live hobbled by my 10 million somewhat rational fears.

Oh, and by the way, read the book. I plan to buy it now, too. Like Laura Ingalls Wilder, it’s simultaneously mundane and obvious and clear and piercing and true. I’d like to think you can’t escape reading the book without starting that thing you’ve been putting off that you know you really want to do. At the very least, I didn’t, and I plan to keep starting.

“The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire,” says the back cover.  This book was a fun read on an airplane.  I like pop sociology/psychology, apparently.

Especially fascinating was the chapter on what makes Blue’s Clues an even more enticing program for kids than Sesame Street, even though Blue’s Clues is a LOT more boring for adults to watch.  Kids don’t think like adults–we know that.  But Blue’s Clues is a great demonstration of how what adults would see as monotony and repetition translate to kids as reliability and comfort.  Basically the chapter is about the usability of TV shows for kids–no wonder I enjoyed it.

Sadder was a chapter that shows through statistics that a sensational death will prompt copycat suicides or murders among similar people.  It’s another demonstration of “social evidence”–when we see some people like us doing something, we’re more likely to do it ourselves.  Likewise, when we see a number of people ignoring someone in distress, we’re more likely to ignore that person as well (ex. the guy asleep in the doorway–drunk? stroke victim?).  It isn’t that we don’t care, it’s that we don’t know what to do.

By the way, the way to counteract this if you need help is to appeal to one individual at a time, rather than saying, “Somebody help me!” And the way to overcome a group’s inertia when you’re in a group and worried about something is to realize that everyone’s waiting for a cue from someone else and create your own cue.  One person really can make a difference.  Perhaps this is why I’m so successful at directing a whole group of people to a specific restaurant for dinner.  We’re all too polite, or confused, to suggest a place to eat, so I speak up, suggest something, but also make it clear that others can feel free to object.  More often than not, that’s where we end up, and I think everyone’s relieved that we’ve made a decision.  If not, hey, time to comment on this blog entry and complain about my restaurant tyranny!

(Aside: Aaron ends up suggesting the restaurants when it’s just the two of us, and then I shoot about 3 down before agreeing to one.  I am reaaaally surprised the man is still married to me sometimes.)

Why did I find this book fun?  Because it’s fascinating to me to get clues about why people do what they do.  It’s a wonder, really, that I didn’t major in psychology or sociology in college, except that I was too young to know that it fascinated me yet and I wanted something obvious and marketable. (French literature?! Yeah, well, I repeat, I was young–only 16 when I went to college.) But the fun part now is that I get to read whatever I want on the plane, and then blog about it here!

OK, so first of all, who could resist a book with a title like that?

But the book surprised me with its depth from the first sentences of the preface.  (Unlike many books, the preface in this one was worth reading.)  The author begins with emptying her parents’ house after they’ve both died.  I was moved by the contrast between saving her father’s papers–two librarians were coming to collect them–and having to casually toss or squirrel away bits of her mother’s careful arrangement of kitchen tools, coupons, and favorite recipes.

“This is a book … grounded in my fascination with the old routines and rhythms of orderly housekeeping, and in my equally strong suspicion of those routines, my fear that devotion to them is a trap, capable of snaring my ambition and worldly talent.” (p. xviii)  Yep.

“Over and over I found myself writing about a paradox that became more obvious with each assignment I took: as women have achieved more power in the world–power of a kind my mother and her friends from nursing school could never have imagined–they have become increasingly attracted to the privileges and niceties of traditional womanhood.” (p. xix)  Yep.

“What few will admit–because it is painful, because it reveals the unpleasant truth that life presents a series of choices, each of which precludes a host of other attractive possibilities–is that whichever decision a woman makes, she will lose something of incalculable value.” (p. xx)

Yeah.  This is a really balanced and honest book, from a woman who is all over the map:

• loves her daughter, loves to write,
• has a nanny, works from home,
• hates to clean the house, wishes she knew how,
• knows she would feel stifled as a 50s housewife, recognizes that most 50s housewives were also not June Cleaver, but had drives and ambitions and even paying jobs of their own.

I don’t know if all readers of this blog will enjoy this book, or at least agree with it.  The author was born in 1961, and she’s probably a bit more conflicted and even-handed than some of my liberal and feminist sisters would be.  But to me it felt honest. 

I’ve started realizing that some of what makes a marriage works is sucking it up and maybe doing what might feel like more than half of the work so that your husband will do more than half of the work back.  Frankly, Aaron’s been picking up the slack for years of me resisting household chores in the name of feminism, and I think it’s time for me to grow up.

And I’ve started thinking that going out to eat all the time isn’t always liberating–it can be confining.  It’s nice to grow your own vegetables (even if it’s only tomatoes and broccoli and one stray onion this year).  It can be relaxing to make your own dinner from that awesome one-pot cookbook (I sense another book review coming).  It’s great to have lots of homemade soup in the freezer rather than having to open up a can of super-salty Campbell’s (blech).

I’ve even started taking a stab at house cleaning.  Now there’s a stunner.

Our house cleaning service fired us a few months ago–apparently we’re out of their driving area (or so they said–I tried not to take it too personally, but I think my local friends might say that I tried to take it personally).  After a few heart-to-heart talks, Aaron and I have decided to try to make it on our own.  I think I finally may have grown old enough and been through enough therapy that I can relax my impossibly high standards and just–try–to clean. 

There’s a lot to overcome there.  If you unravel enough knots in my psyche, you discover that my standards have been impossibly high, and that I was afraid that the real consequences of disappointing myself or others were depression and death (yes, really).  But now I have literally learned to live with disappointment.  That just leaves the laziness–now that the big issues are being dealt with, I still have the bad habit of avoiding something that ain’t much fun.

But I’ve noticed that puttering around the house and making things right again is strangely satisfying, if I don’t let feminism and old ghosts and laziness get in the way–if I just let myself be a little.  It’s kind of a quiet way to rebel, actually–I’m not doing it the efficient way, I’m not doing it the perfect way, and I’m being terribly domestic about it all, and yet it makes me content, even happy.  My inner librarian (inner housewife, perhaps?) comes out and takes care of the things that frazzled career woman or distracted bookworm or artistic writer-type left lying around the house.

This book leaves me contemplating all that and much more–stay-at-home vs. outside-working mother? now I’m not so sure again–and for that it was definitely worth far more to me than $18.36 on sale at Green Apple Books. 

What it’s worth to you?  Well, at least it got you this blog entry.

I love chick lit.  Not only is it generally good, fluffy fun, but sometimes a book will surprise you by going a little deeper and meaning a bit more to you than you expected.  Help Wanted, Desperately by Ariel Horn is one of these books.

I just love the main character. Alexa is a young, neurotic Jewish girl going to UPenn and dating a guy living in Manhattan, and she wants a job in Manhattan before she graduates.  Her alternative plan is teaching English in a remote Third World country, and she knows that this plan is really only a) running away from her problems, b) so horrible that it will scare her into finding something! anything! better, but c) still better than moving back in with her parents or going to law school.

Unusually in a chick lit book, the boyfriend and the romance are not issues.  He’s rock-steady and loves her despite, and even partly because, of her incredible neuroses.  And this is where I started to realize that she is me.  I may not be Jewish, but I grew up in upstate New York, lived in Manhattan, and am descended from neurotic Eastern European refugees.  Trust me, I even have the nose and a background reading Chaim Potok and Isaac Bashevis Singer – all I’m missing is the hair (helloooo, Aryan princess!) and the designer jeans.  More to the point, my struggle in my twenties was all about figuring out who I was and how I could possibly be worth anything without knowing what I should do with my life — while my loving boyfriend, then fiance, then husband kept trying to get through my thick skull that of course I was worth something — and of course I deserved his love.

To be fair, I still have these issues, but they’re a lot better.  And the whole “job determines my worth on the planet” thing is quiescent at the moment while I actually have a job.

The ending is amusing and appropriate — let’s just say that her neuroses become her salvation — but the real joy for me was the feeling of validation.  Yes, other people felt this way, and look how far I’ve come from feeling like if I didn’t figure out exactly! what my career should be now! that I was going to die!  Instead I recognize that, like her, trying things is the only way figure out where I’m going.  Although, unlike her, deodorant sniffer and earthworm breeder aren’t on my list of options.