Allison's Innocence

 While Allison was aware of her family's shortcomings, especially her father's, from a young age, these issues became starkly apparent when she began to go through puberty. To start, while Allison keeps the fact that she gets her period for the first time from her mother, the audience is still clued in because of the notes she left herself in her diary. With this being said, it seems almost as if moments after she enters puberty, her entire worldview begins to shift drastically. A major example of this occurring in Chapter 6, in which Allison states, "This juxtaposition of the last days of childhood with those of Nixon and the end of that larger, national innocence may seem trite" (Bechdell, 155). In saying this, this is one of the first of many instances in which Allison compares her lose of innocence to that of the adults that surround her.

In furthering this, aforementioned loss of innocence is repeated only pages later when Allison's mother clues her in on her father's issues. For example, while Allison was mentally preparing herself to tell her mother that she got her period for the first time, her mother quickly redirected the conversation to that of Allison's father - a conversation that clues the audience in on Bruce's relations with young boys, thus causing the family to look into possibly moving to start anew. 

In closing this argument, as Allison was beginning to further internalize that of her father's relations, a storm begins to brew. While Allison notes the intensity of the storm, the way that she chooses to end the scene is rather telling of her family's situation. For example, while she notes that the intensity of the storm took down a tree in their yard, the same cannot be said for the surrounding areas. In furthering this, Allison states, "None of the neighbors had much damage. It was as if a tornado had touched down precisely at our address" (179). To close, I found this statement to be extremely crucial to the argument of Allison's lose of innocence because it greatly highlights her growing understanding of her family's fundamental issues.

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