Chapter 1

● Distant relationship of Alison and father (rarely touch)

● Irony of Icaran games is that her father plummeted
● Bruce’s obsession with big gothic house with lavish decorations (an illusion/facade)
● Bruce is like Daedalus (inventor) and doesn’t care about family’s opinions
● House is compared to the labyrinth making escape impossible (family is trapped by bruce)
● Alison describes her family as an artificial structure more than real family (“the image of a family)
● Bruce neglects his wife and his children and loves things to “appear” better than they are (repress reality of
his sexuality and pedophilia)
● Alison prefers the functional whereas Bruce prefers appearance
Chapter 2
● Alison’s family believes bruce’s death was intentional
● Bruce’s life all remained in 1 mile of each other (represents bruce’s feeling of claustraphobia and repression)
● Alison and her brothers have fun in the funeral home (funhome) which is very ironic
● Funeral home is more like home to the kids than anything, helps desensitize them to death
● Alison looking at her first cadaver with her father traumatized her and caused her to repress feelings of grief
for her father when he died
● The siblings can’t deal with grief (grinning to each other, crying for only 2 minutes, funeral director consoling
Alison bothers her)
Chapter 3
● Alison’s coming out felt upstaged by revelation about bruce and feels her coming out led to her father’s
suicide
● Bruce is similar to jay gatsby (both use their house to project an image that is not true)
● Alison’s parents relationship was most real to her in fictional terms (Fitzgerald and Henry James) because
they seemed so distant
● Parent’s relationship similar to the taming of the shrew
● Allison’s mother didn’t like her being lesbian although her father didn’t mind
● Ends by stating she will never know which parts of bruce were real or fiction
Chapter 4
● Alison disliked bruce’s love of flowers made him a “sissy”
● Bruce groomed boys like he groomed his flowers
● Alison complete opposite of bruce as she is a “butch” (Alison tried to compensate for bruce’s unmanliness
● Alison moved to new york hoping to find a community when she became isolated
● Alison emirates herself in lesbian culture and literature in college
● On the camping trip Alison wanted to pretend to be a boy and felt disappointed when she couldn’t soot the
gun
Chapter 5
● Wonders if beach creek is the reason for bruce’s death
● Alison showed a poem to bruce which he then improvised and killed Alison’s passion for writing poems (also
stopped using color in tehe book)
● Alison’s mother is too absorbed in her own artistic pursuits than in Alison and her siblings which leads them
to also turn to art but left little room for love in her family
● Alison’s mother helps her overcome her OCD by taking dictation
Chapter 6
● Alison’s dad arrested for picking up underage boy

LadyBird

● Lots of external pressure on ladybird

● Lots of family issues in the family
● Ladybird compares herself to rich people and feels insecure about being poor (private school)
● Mom is quite controlling
● Family is very open with problems
● Ladybird is quite immature
● Ladybird feels her mother doesn't like her even though she loves her
● Julie is her real friend
● Doesn't join family thanksgiving
● Starts cheating in math class
● Starts hanging out with “popular girls”
● Doesn’t accept peer pressure to ditch prom.
● Ladybird applied to New York university without her mother's approval