Prior to her pregnancy, Bechdel's mother wrote poetry; she would not write another poem until her husband was dead and her children were grown and had moved away. In an interview with John Killacky, Bechdel explains, "Virginia Woolf figures into my book because she talked about how the experience of writing about her parents in To the Lighthouse was a way of getting them out of her head" (Killacky 44). Bechdel draws her mother standing in a field of shadow, head tilted downward, hair in an elegant bun (136). Demonstrating the modernist possibilities of the graphic novel to create simultaneous visual and thematic connections while emphasizing the fragmentation of memory and slippage within time, Bechdel juxtaposes crucial developmental scenes from childhood and her emerging adulthood.