Icarus and Daedalus

Alison’s relationship with her father, although very atypical and seemingly destructive, was very loving. She grew up in a very morbid setting with dark family secrets she was not even aware of until her college years. Her father’s repressed homosexuality stirred trouble everywhere around him. After cheating and fooling around with young boys, he lost his job, his wife’s trust and sanity, and almost went to jail. Alison’s parents projected their anger towards her and her brothers leaving them confused and distant. She had witnessed her parents show affection to each other on only two occasions but other than that her parents kept busy away from each other through their own facades – acting and restoring a dirty, old house. Alison and her father were eventually desensitized to everything that should have upset them and both had a strange habit of fishing for sympathetic or shocked reactions that they wish they could feel.

The theme of this book was not necessarily homosexuality itself. Instead, she uses that as a main example of how much she and her father loved each other. She always found comfort in knowing that they were so similar. He and Alison never had solid conversations but they connected when her father recommended books and then discussed literature in school and at home. She wondered if the picture she found of him in women’s clothes was taken the same way her girlfriend took a picture of her on her twenty-first birthday. Even though she describes him as the driving force of chaos in her household, compares their relationship to Icarus and his father, she says that paternity is very important and that “…he was there to catch me when I leapt.”