notes epitome of incomprehensibility Definition of a lost cause: returning to the hasty notes I wrote on the train for the presentation I'm doing this Thursday and expecting to find something coherent. Here we go: contrasted with the emphasis on homemaking in West At the same time, freedoms and repressions -Vanderbeke: traditional gender roles: grandmother’s cooking (darker side: her racist views about son-in-law). Mother not a good cook, but her unwillingness to adapt also demonstrates her inflexibility. ... The actual topic is interesting: ideas about raising children in East and West Germany in the late 1940s to 1960s, with references to the partly_autobiographical novel You Would Have Missed Me by Birgit Vanderbeke. The "darker" part isn't a pun, not even unintentional: the grandmother suspects the father of being half Chinese, on basically no evidence. Turns out he's an abusive asshole, so the woman's suspicions are warranted...just, his ethnic background is NOT the issue. 230411 ... e_o_i Now they're for a comparative essay and halfway coherent, if incomplete: General, for thesis: All three books have autobiographical components All three books have external threat, something shadowing the safety of the characters: - Child of All Nations: exile from the Nazi regime, the possibility of war - You Would Have Missed Me: abusive parents; split Germany, Cold War -Persepolis: oppressive government, Iran/Iraq war Author persona foreshadowed or expressed in character of child narrator: -Child of All Nations: Kully’s conversation with Herr Krabbe about writing a book -You Would Have Missed Me: Narrator’s time travel, interacting with future voice, metafictional conceit, as if author is talking to the narrator and by extension her younger self -Persepolis: Marjane’s drawings? Find specific example 230427 what's it to you? who go blather from