Fun Home
Descriptions of Bechdel’s family business contribute an element of quirkiness to her story. Her great-grandfather Edgar T. Bechdel began a funeral parlor (32), which her grandma now owns. It is this funeral parlor that is the namesake of Bechdel’s novel: “The ‘fun home,’ as we called it, was up on Main Street. My grandmother lived in the front. The business was in the back” (36). Bechdel herself would, on occasion, “spend the night in the funeral home proper, even when we had a dead person. My brothers and I often slept there with my grandmother” (39). The graphic novel is steeped in humor, often morbid at times: “Who embalms the undertaker when he dies?” (51).
The form of the memoir is quite unique since Bechdel chose to include references to literature, which are integrated into the telling of her and her father’s story. Writers referenced include Albert Camus (47), F. Scott Fitzgerald (63), Marcel Proust (92), and James Joyce (206). A reference to a piece of literature often works as a segue into a particular memory. One example of narrative flow from the published literature to the personal life involves Bechdel’s development: “As Proust himself so lavishly illustrates, eros and botany are pretty much the same thing. And budding is the only possible words to describe the painful, itchy beginnings of my breasts, at twelve” (109). The narrative moves from describing Proust’s novel to describing Bechdel’s developing relationship with her gender and sexuality.
Alison Bechdel’s house is the setting of most of the autobiography, which Bechdel describes as a “gothic revival house . . . built during the small Pennsylvania town’s one brief moment of wealth, from the lumber industry, in 1867” (8). Her father spent most of his time living there refurbishing the house, trying to restore the home to its original condition.
Bechdel often compares her house to a museum, describing her family life as a museum “exhibit” (13) with her and her siblings who live there creating “a sort of still life with children” (13). She explains, “It’s tempting to suggest, in retrospect, that our family was a sham. That our house was not a real home at all but the simulacrum of one, a museum” (17).
The boundary between the real and the imaginary, building on the concept of the house and the museum, is an omnipresent theme in the novel. Bechdel’s father certainly had a fascination with this concept: “A suspension of the imaginary in the real was, after all, my father's stock in trade” (65). Bechdel begins to take after her father and becomes interested in this as well, exemplified through the way in which she attributes meaning to her childhood favorite map, of which her favorite thing about it was, “its mystical bridging of the symbolic and the real, of the label and the thing itself” (147).
Bechdel’s description of the external appearance of the house contrasting with the wildly different reality inside of it is used as a narrative device to mirror the contrast between her father’s role as a model husband to the external world, and the reality of his secret affairs with other men. Which person is real, Bechdel wonders? Bechdel observes a kind of split self in her father, the difference between who he presented himself to be and who he was behind closed doors: “Typical of the way my father juggled his public appearance and private reality, the evidence is simultaneously hidden and revealed” (101).
Fun Home is a graphic memoir that artfully balances humor and truth. The memoir wades through murky, unresolved territory, as Bechdel embarks on a journey to try to understand her father who has passed away and, therefore, cannot ever be fully understood. Yet it is in the trail left behind Bechdel’s path—the path she created in trying to connect the dots to make sense of her father’s life—that readers learn a great deal about Bechdel herself.
