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Fun Home: A Tragicomic is a graphic memoir that tells the story of author Alison Bechdel and her fraught relationship with her father, Bruce, a closeted gay man and a sexual predator who killed himself when Alison was 19. Bechdel uses an essayistic writing style paired with drawings that are often precise recreations of photographs, diaries, letters, newspaper articles, and other archival sources from her life to better understand her emotionally distant parents and to interrogate her understanding of herself, her sexuality, and the world around her. Concerned with the troubling gap between language and meaning, Bechdel often uses her illustrations to say what she struggles to articulate with words alone. Bechdel holds many contradictory realities at once within her memoir, such as her father’s violence and his kindness, his penchant for artifice and impulses toward disclosure, and the simultaneous affinity and aversion that she and her father seem to feel for each other. Bechdel finds no easy answers to her questions about who her father was, how she is and is not like him, and what could’ve prevented his suicide. Instead, she holds with deft attention and keen insight the messy truths, half-truths, lies, and imaginative possibilities that have shaped her reality.

Read more about the style and presentation of the graphic memoir Fun Home.

Alison grows up in Beech Creek, a small town in Pennsylvania where the Bechdels have lived for generations and have run the town’s funeral home (ironically nicknamed the “fun home”). An anxious, watchful child, Alison is often scared of Bruce, who is prone to violent outbursts, holding Alison and her two brothers to punishing standards as he focuses on the obsessive upkeep of their labyrinthine, well-appointed home. Indeed, Bruce often shows more care and attention to objects than to his family. Though Alison prefers androgynous or masculine clothing, Bruce often polices Alison’s gender expression, forcing her to wear dresses and barrettes, which Bechdel interprets as her father’s attempt to express his own repressed feminine side through her. Alison wants to be close to her father and delights in the rare moments when they are physically close, such as when they play airplane together. But not only is Bruce only fleetingly present, he’s also unpredictable, often striking his children but sometimes showing moments of kindness that Bechdel describes as “incandescent.” As her father vacillates between cruelty and kindness, Alison struggles to understand him—and herself.

Read an analysis of Alison Bechdel’s role within Fun Home.

Alison’s anxieties as a child are closely tied to her father’s angry outbursts, and, Bechdel suggests, to his closeted life and the strife that his secrecy causes in their home. Her anxiety first manifests as obsessive-compulsive disorder when she is ten years old, as Alison begins fixating on even numbers, on an invisible substance between objects, and on performing daily tasks in ritualistic order. Bechdel links these attempts to control her surroundings to her feelings of helplessness around her parents, who fight constantly and rarely show her any physical affection. Though her mother, Helen, notices that Alison is experiencing compulsions, Alison still struggles with them mostly alone. A lonely child, Alison starts keeping a diary at her father’s suggestion, but soon her compulsions show up in her private writing, too. Fixated on whether her sentences can be objectively true, she begins drawing a made-up symbol over words and pages to indicate her doubt and to avoid inadvertently writing something untrue. The symbol begins to obscure the sentences themselves, illustrating how Alison’s doubt and anxiety often become louder than any other experience in her life.

Read an explanation of an important quote about Alison’s struggle with knowing anything with certainty.

As she’s growing up, Alison and her brothers spend a lot of time in the funeral home, which gives them a unique relationship with death. When Alison, away at college, finds out that her father has died after being struck by a bread truck, her grief is complicated both by her complex relationship with her father and by her many childhood experiences that had demystified some aspects of death. In one scene, her father, who is both a high school English teacher and the town’s undertaker, invites young Alison into the mortuary where a dead man is open on the table as he embalms him. In the wake of her father’s death, Alison notices that she isn’t grieving the way she thinks she’s supposed to, such as when she and her brother greet each other with strange grins before their father’s funeral, a shared acknowledgment of the absurdity of death. Though Bruce’s death is ruled an accident, Alison and her mother are sure it's a suicide, an act that Bechdel calls a “final artifice” from a lifetime of secrets and lies. Pretending that the secret of his death is true adds to a sense of bifurcation for Alison in the early stages of her grief.

Read an important quote about Alison’s sense of distance from her father.

Bechdel describes her father’s death as “queer,” emphasizing the many meanings of the word: that it was strange, had elements of artifice, and that it was related to his sexuality. Bechdel links her father’s sexuality to her own, in part because, just four months before her father killed himself, she had come out to her parents as a lesbian in a letter she wrote them from college. For Bechdel, her father’s death and her own coming out are inextricably linked, as are hers and her father’s queerness. In her response to Alison’s coming out, Helen tells Alison that Bruce often sleeps with men and boys, including Alison’s childhood babysitter. This overshadows Alison’s own coming out, leaving her feeling alone with her revelation, and later, when her father dies, she feels in some inexplicable way like her coming out prompted his suicide. Believing that she has this power over him makes sense since her role in her family is often to act as caretaker for her parents when her parents should be tending to her feelings instead.

Read about the devastating effects that secrets can have on a family as a Main Idea (#3) of Fun Home.

Bechdel also suspects that what ultimately drove Bruce to suicide was Helen’s decision to divorce him. Bruce’s affairs with men and his predation on young boys often impact not just their marriage but the entire family’s security. In one pivotal incident, Bruce gives beer to an underage boy, who reports him to the police. Though Alison, 13 at the time, doesn’t realize that her father’s legal troubles are tied to preying on boys just a couple of years older than she is, she later understands that they almost had to move from their home because of her father’s sexual predation. Bechdel reflects on the shame her father seemed to feel, such as when, on his way to see a psychiatrist, he calls himself a bad person, and Bechdel notes that this shame seems to fuel his rage and unpredictability throughout Alison’s childhood. Bechdel also empathizes with how hard it must’ve been for her father to be closeted, wondering how his life might have been different if he had had the kind of freedom she experienced as a gay woman a generation later.

Read an explication of Bruce Bechdel in Fun Home.

Throughout the memoir, Alison and Bruce find intimacy most easily through literature. As a child, Alison feels close to her father when he’s reading to her. In high school, when Alison is in her father’s literature class, they share some of their most intimate moments in the public space of the classroom while sharing ideas about books. When Alison goes to college, Bruce becomes keenly interested in her literature classes, often reading alongside her and sharing books with her. He expresses himself most freely in letters, frequently using literary references to explain his feelings, such as paraphrasing Ulysses by James Joyce when he writes to Alison for the first time about being gay. Bechdel, in turn, turns to books to understand her father in the wake of his death, using close readings of his favorite texts like Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to make sense of who he was and how he felt. Fun Home itself is a testament to Bechdel’s attempts to understand her father through literature, to see him clearly as he may have been unable to see himself, and ultimately to free herself from his unfinished story.

Read about how art and literature help connect Alison with her father (Main Idea #2).

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