Special Exits: a cold look at life?

When reading Special Exits, I didn’t really feel that Joyce Farmer was casting a cold look at her own life in creating the book. For one thing, she changed most of the characters’ names, giving her memoir a fictional feel to it. I didn’t fully get the sense that this was her life that she was depicting; it almost seemed like it could have been someone else’s. There was a certain distance that she kept which prevented the book from becoming overly invasive and personal. She rarely depicted scenes from her home life, choosing rather to show the lives of her parents in great detail but distancing herself from the reader by not putting herself under such a close microscope. As a result, the reader learns much more about Lars and Rachel than about Laura, who seems more like a regular visitor than a main character. Furthermore, Farmer rarely documents personal scenes or conversations; most of the book just consists of everyday struggles like cooking, bathing, and cleaning, without focusing on the emotional connections between the characters. The interpersonal relationships are touched on but not fully explored, which to me left the characters feeling not fully formed and thus, in some way, fictional. It seemed like, had the characters been real people (as they supposedly are), their representations in Farmer’s book would have felt more lifelike and less two-dimensional.

Also, in terms of an author averting his or her eye, I felt that there was some of that going on regarding Farmer’s depiction of her decision to put Rachel in a nursing home. Farmer didn’t show much debate or discussion on Laura’s part, and she certainly didn’t represent much guilt about the decision. There were a couple panels that showed some internal feeling, but for me they really weren’t enough to convey what I thought must have been a very emotionally difficult decision. Farmer seemed to avoid depicting a lot of her own struggle during her parents’ decline and death, and while she showed their physical struggle, I didn’t feel like I fully witnessed their emotional journey and trouble. Therefore, I can’t say that I consider Farmer to have cast a cold look on her parents’ deaths and on her own life in this book, because it seemed like there were some topics that she often avoided.