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Again, the troubling gap between word and meaning. My feeble language skills could not bear the weight of such a laden experience.

In this quote from 5. The Canary-Colored Caravan of Death, Bechdel remarks on the brevity with which a formative trip is represented in her diary. The previous section of the memoir describes this trip—during which Alison had grappled with her gender expression, encountered a snake, and tried to shoot a gun—in vivid detail. Yet, in this callback, Bechdel demonstrates how pared down, by comparison, her language was at the time. “[W]e saw a snake,” young Alison writes, scribbled over with the insignia she used as a child to illustrate her doubt. As a child, Alison felt like she was unable to know anything with certainty, while in her memoir, Bechdel finds a literal and visual language to recover the meaning she hadn’t been able to articulate as a child.

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