Need More Love Chapter 2-4: Voice and Tone
As Aline leaves home to enter art school, she goes down a path of a hippie, flower power and all, and we get to see the distance she puts not just from her family and audience, but from her self and her memories. All throughout the beginning of chapter 2 when she is still trying to discover herself, Aline writes in a way to truly show how lost and disconnected from life she was. Events were described vaguely and gave that's part of her life a kind of fog, just as she felt it. As we get into later events where she meets her future husband and joins Wimmens Comix there is more clarity but still a sense of floating as she goes through this stage of her life.
In chapter 3, we see her start to settle into a more domestic life with Robert and hone her skills in the comic publishing world. There are times she writes of simple pleasures, it's interesting she included something as slow as learning to play an instrument from a family in the town. Something so small and yet she write it with such a wonderful sense of nostalgia, the audience can get the sense that she was truly revealing in such little pleasures during that time of her life. It's interesting then, that she uses an even grander sense of wonder when Aline speaks of her first time in Europe and how she was never the same after that. The last major section of this chapter has to be the birth of her first child, and yet, from how she writes it, there wasn't a lot of attention given to Sophia even in the blurb written for her.
Once Aline realized that she was spiralling into the domestic wife life, she uprooted her life and took Robert and Sophia to live in the south of France. Aline writes this chapter with a kind of rejuvenated sense of self, as if life had been weighing so heavily on her and now she was free, even though it was at the expense of her daughters young life being completely uprooted. Sophia unsurprisingly was bullied and estranged and grew up estranged, just like her mother, and yet while eating this, I couldn't sense any kind of regret or remorse for this. It seemed that Aline was simply happy that she had a new sense of self.
Kominsky-Crumb, A. (2007). Need More Love. New York: MQ Publications.