A Circle Inside of a Square

What is the significance of Bechdel using letters or photographs in her drawings? Why did she draw these kinds of things instead of writing them in the narrative portion of the book?

After reading, do you believe her fathers death was a suicide and does it matter to the story whether we know the truth or not? 

Why do you think Alison wants a connection between her coming out and her fathers death? 

Bechdel seems to want to judge her father and to resist judging him, perhaps most notoriously on page 100 (where she asks the question about whether she'd react to the picture of her father and Roy if the lover were a teenage girl instead). Why do you think her reaction to the picture was the way it was? 

How did Bechdel’s relationship with her father change as she became an adult and a self-identified lesbian ?

Why do we think that literature plays such a big part in Alison’s life? Was this a connection with her father? Or did it serve as a different purpose?

Bechdel claims that there was something entirely fictional about the life her family led. What does she mean by that? 

Alison and her father are to be inverts of each other (chapter 4). She is seen almost trying to make up for his lack of masculinity “I measured my father against the grimy deer hunters at the gas station uptown, with their yellow workboots and shorn-sheep haircuts. Where he fell short, I stepped in.” And her father appears to express his femininity through her in dictating the way she dresses as well as through housework and expressing a love for beautiful things. Can we say that here, gender is a performative concept or merely a performance?

In the chapter “A Happy Death,” Alison expresses that her family is obsessed with the story of her father stuck in the mud- “by day, it was difficult to imagine Dad ever helpless, naked…” Is this because of the upheld concept of a masculine father who could have none of these concepts (be naked, helpless, or even saved)?