The body broken by lynne greenberg5/24/2023 ![]() ![]() 108) most of all, they see symbols everywhere, and treat them as though they were deliberate plot devices employed by an unseen author. They imagine themselves and their relatives into pre-existing stories, from Greek myths to children’s books they portray the imaginary with the same fidelity as the “real”, such as when Winterson psychically splits from her inner child, or when Bechdel draws herself as an “Eisenhower-era butch” walking past her own parents before she was born (p. Bechdel and Winterson take this process to its logical extremes. Narration is how we create meaning from meaninglessness. As humans, we have to omit, enhance and alter details in order to understand our memories, or tell a coherent story. All autobiography, and indeed the act of remembering itself, involves narrativizing the chaotic. ![]() In terms of their eloquence and their many references to literature but most importantly of all in terms of their tendency to read a life-story as just that – a story. ![]() Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) and Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2012) are highly literate memoirs. ![]()
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