She calls herself "butch to his nelly"(15), which foreshadows the revelation that both father and daughter are homosexual. Bechdel writes about the emergence of her own minimalist aesthetic as a reaction to her father's embellishments. This melodic repetition emphasizes Bruce Bechdel's ability to cover up harsh realities with beautiful artifice, thus foreshadowing the revelation that he was not the cookie-cutter husband and father he pretended to be. In describing her father's penchant for interior decoration, Bechdel calls him "an alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a Daedalus of decor" (6).
"In our particular reenactment of this mythic relationship," she writes, "it was not me but my father who was to plummet from the sky" (4). She uses this visual to invoke the myth of Icarus and Daedalus, thus foreshadowing her father's self-destructive path. The first image in the memoir is of young Alison playing "airplane" with her father.
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