Right off the bat, Alison Bechdel begins her graphic memoir by using a fictional framework to understand her reality. In this case, Alison uses the Greek myth of Icarus as a way to understand her relationship with her father. (In this myth, Daedalus and his son Icarus are imprisoned in a tower and Daedalus constructs wings for them to fly away with. He warns Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, as it will melt the wings, but Icarus flies too high anyway, and falls into the sea and dies.) Yet Alison’s reality diverges from the narrative arc of the myth—rather than Alison being the one to plummet from the sky and die, it is her father who metaphorically falls to his (actual) death. (It should also be noted that the chapter title comes from Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which also deals with the Icarus myth and plays an important role later in the book.)