A scene that grabbed my attention from Fun Home is on page 148, in which Alison is looking at her dead distant cousin’s body. Alison Bechdel has expressed earlier how large her extended family gets simply because the town is so small and her family has a long history in the town. When three people die in a car crash on Route 150, it’s a big deal because Fun Home has never had a “triple feature”. This use of language to describe an immense amount of death shows a disconnection Alison has from death because of her upbringing. Something is brought up within her when she looks at the dead body of a distant cousin who is her age. It seems that she relates to him in some manner, and looking at his graying skin is bringing out some of her humanity. When writing in her journal for that day, the entry is almost completely obscured. This obscuring of the message shows how much the death messed with Alison’s sense of reality and grief. It seems like an out of body experience in which she does trust her mind and what is going on with reality, which is truly terrifying.
A scene that changed my perspective of reading Funhome was on page 86. When Alison is talking about the motivation behind her father’s suicide. Wanting to continue to believe it was in a way her fault to keep their connection alive. This perspective of interactions stayed with me throughout the entire book. Even though the relationship she had with her father was so painful; all the different ways she tries to keep their relationship alive (even after he is gone) fascinates me. Through books, english classes, writing letter, and just taking care and spending time with a him. Additionally, how being gay divides them as well as unites them in the end. All of this brought me to the conclusion of how elastic love can be, even if someone is horrible to you.
Captured in pages 117-118, the scene in the diner when baby Allison sees a butch woman for the first time struck me as significant to the rest of the text, particularly in the thread of Allison’s gender presentation and sexuality.
From a narrative standpoint, this scene can also be viewed as planting the seed for Allison’s sexual identity. Seeing this woman was not, of course, the source of her butchness and lesbianism, nor the start of her exploration and acceptance, but sparked the subliminal desire for butchness that the reader sees earlier in the book. Since the book is nonlinear, until this point the subject of Allison’s gender presentation is implied to be related to her lesbianism, based off the knowledge that she is a lesbianism along with how her fashion sense foils her father’s, but was not confirmed. This scene provides solid confirmation that refutes any notion she could have just been a tomboy or retaliating against her father’s desires, recontextualizing any point after this moment (or previously in the text) as a subliminal desire to achieve this role and presentation within the lesbian community.
One scene I felt particularly drawn to was the bottom right panel on page 226. In it, Alison stands in front of her father’s grave soon after he dies. There is a temporary grave marker there, soon to be replaced by the granite obelisk. The corn in the background is low to the ground and Alison is wearing sport shorts and a t-shirt. It seemed to encompass the cycles Alison and her father live in during this book. She describes herself at one point as starting her life when her father ended his, which can be seen in how the corn is new, barely blooming, when he is buried. And the temporary grave marker is packed with meaning.
Not only is it a placard provided by her own father’s funeral home, the word funeral abbreviated to “fun’l”, the letters on it seem to be replaceable and rearrangeable. It appears to be a marquee letter sign, with the appropriate letters swapped in to represent both any person and no one in specific. This image seems to show how death reduced the complex character of Bruce Bechdel to something temporary. It emphasizes how fleeting and simple Alison’s relationship to her father seemed to be, even though it in actuality was much deeper.
Pages 100-102 of Fun Home describe a photo Alison finds after her father’s death, of Roy, their old babysitter. She notices first that she isn’t as affected (outraged) by the photo and the inappropriate relationship between her father and Roy that it implies. She then notices the halfhearted attempt to censor or hide the photos by her father by crossing out dates and placing the photo with others from the same vacation. This reflection on her father and his relationship with the rest of the family set up more of Bechdel’s attempts to square her experiences with her father with her own life. When she concludes that the family photos and the photo of Roy are two sides of the same coin, she begins to make clear how she has come to think of her father. Not only does she see her father as a more whole person than either image would suggest, she also sees herself, as a part of the family, as one part of what makes her father who he is. She draws parallels between herself and her father throughout the book, but this one feels more direct than many of them. She combines experience with her reflection with background from other work in this moment, giving you a point to look in at how the rest of the book will work before she moves on.
Early into the story on page 31, Alison describes how her accomplished mother and father remained in her father’s hometown. On this page, we see that Bruce’s family chose to stay in the same area with Alison’s cousin moving right next to their mother, her aunt, Sue. Alison says “It was made clear that my brothers and I would not repeat their mistake” and her mother says “Don’t you kids get any ideas about dragging a trailer into the backyard. After you graduate from high school I don’t want to see you again.” Although it initially seems like Helen, her mother is cold and distant, it grows into an attempt to protect her children. As the story progresses we see that staying in her hometown would only prove to be a burden just as it had been for her father. This is emphasized on page 125 when someone tells her “the lord moves in mysterious ways” the wishes she could say “He killed himself because he was a manic-depressive, closeted fag and he couldn’t face living in this small-minded small town one more second.” Alison understands the effect that living in a small town had on her father and likely could have on herself too. Thus, when her mother tells her to move away it emphasizes the idea that moving away, through vacations, the threat of moving states when her father goes to court, and leaving for college, will give her a good start for a life of self-understanding while processing the complex relationship between her and her father.
At the end of Chapter 3, on page 86, I was drawn to the two panels that were about the timing of Bruce Bechdel’s death, following a brief discussion on the previous page about the parallels between his circumstance and the death of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Alison chooses to reject the idea, however, that her father modeled his death after Fitzgerald because it would mean it had nothing to do with her and break that last remaining tie between them. I think this is an interesting scene to observe the whole text through because it has an underlying desperation for connection in any way, shape, or form. The visuals depict a young Alison writing, presumably in her diary, and Bruce reading Zelda. One angle is from inside the house and the other is from outside. The father and daughter look remarkably similar in their focus and expression. Yet, there is an almost cold distance between them. The panel speaks to how even in close proximity within a room and through bonds over literature, the two never had the family dynamic or closeness that Alison longed for. There is also distance in their queer identities. Upon Alison’s letter, the communication between her and Bruce is sparse and vague. Since they never bond over sexuality, Alison conjures a viable connection that her coming out at least partly caused her father’s death, eliciting some emotional response rather than none.
The particular scene of Fun Home that caught my attention was the final panels on page 232, where a young Allison is leaping into the arms of her father, who is waiting in the pool below. Here, Allison and her father are compared to Icarus, a figure from Greek mythology who serves as a symbol of pride, hubris, and ultimately, knowing when to stop yourself. In mythology, Daedalus attempts to stop Icarus, his son, from flying too close to the sun, and is unable to catch him, and Icarus falls dead into the sea. In Fun Home, Bechdel’s father tries to stop her from pursuing her more “queer” interests, such as dressing in more masculine clothing, because he has struggled with his own homosexual identity for his entire life. When he dies, Allison’s father ‘drops’ into the sea as Icarus did. However, Bechdel also poses the question: “What if Icarus hadn’t hurtled into the sea? What if he’d inherited his father’s inventive bent? What might he have wrought?.” In this situation, the “Icarus” is Bechdel herself, who is leaping into the pool where her father awaits. This is very symbolic of the similarities between Bechdel and her father – both are queer, and that is an undeniably dangerous leap to make. However, through Bechdel’s unique connection with her father, she is able to make the leap of faith into his waiting arms at the end of the novel and fully embrace her identity and their complex relationship that was developed throughout the entire book.
The scene on pages 220 and 221 in which Bechdel finally broaches the subject of sexuality directly with her father during a car ride to a theater stood out to me. This is an important moment in terms of their relationship—as her father opens up to her verbally about his sexuality for the first time and she draws connections to him for the first time aloud—and it also symbolizes the style of the novel itself—Bechdel’s allusions to various literary works, which is what brought her and her father together. However, what stood out to me the most in this scene was the illustration. While it’s easy to get focused on Bechdel’s words, the art really complements and enhances the narrative. I found it was easy to glance at the illustrations to just glean base-level information, but in these two pages, the repetition draws your eyes to the illustrations. From frame to frame, there are subtle differences between each character’s facial expressions and body language, but also similarities. For example, these are three panels without any words and, in them, their similarities in appearance and body language are highlighted. While the words in this scene matter a lot, Bechdel’s illustrations tell a story even without the words, demonstrating that sometimes the most important things are observed and not said. This scene opened my eyes to the brilliance of Bechdel’s illustrations, which I hadn’t been fully appreciating before.
A moment that stood out to me was on page 211 and it’s the scene of Alison’s father’s letter after Alison announced she was lesbian. This scene was striking to me because while her father is talking about The Odyssey, he uses it as a metaphor to truly explain his feelings without having to explicitly state them. Bechdel also makes an effort to show conflicting emotions on the father’s behalf. In the letter, Alison’s father makes the inference that Alison already knew about his queerness. In relation to the entire text, Alison was an observer of her father throughout the course of her upbringing. This sort of connection that Alison and her father are more similar than either wants to admit to forms a deeper connection than both party’s allow to take place. It’s also symbolic that her father admits to all of this in a letter, rather than speaking it to Allison. Moreover, within the whole text, Alison’s father was never open about many aspects of his life and Alison had always been reaching out to connect with him.
I was particularly fascinated by Bechdel’s description of her journals throughout her struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Particularly on pages 141-143, she explains how she started writing “I think” next to all of her statements as if she didn’t trust her own reliability. She then develops a shorthand version to go in between the words, then on top of the words, and then over the entire page. This is the process of her descent into a headspace of uncertainty and instability, in which she feels she cannot truly be sure of anything. It was distressing to read because it is tragic for anyone, especially a child, to not feel grounded in reality. Bechdel was terrified of writing anything that was untrue, and so she developed a safety net which meant she could not be questioned. If later she found out she had remembered something wrong, she had the automatic defense that she only “thought”, that she wasn’t “sure”. This epidemic of “I think” speaks to all of Bechdel’s childhood, specifically her relationship with her family. Her compulsions for even numbers of floorboards and water droplets were undoubtedly a way of gaining control in the hostile and unpredictable environment of her home. However, they became more extreme when she started to question her own reality. This is just one way in the text in which Bechdel’s mental health is affected by her family’s dynamic. Throughout the entire book, her emotions and patterns of behavior shift as her family changes.
The scene that stood out most to me was when Alison realized she never wanted to conventionally marry anyone after seeing her parent’s marriage, at the top of page 74 when she realizes she is a lesbian. This way of finding out about her queerness, through literature, particularly was of interest to me. Throughout the rest of the novel, we learn that the only tangible way that Alison has any relationship to her father is through books and their shared queer identity. Both of these tie back to her own self-discovery, and Alison’s exploration of herself only fleshes out further for the remainder of the novel.
The way this changed my thinking about the text was critical: without this realization of her sexuality, she never would have had a deeper tie to her father. Thus, Alison’s relationship to her queerness being juxtaposed to her father’s for the rest of the text works to further elevate and heighten the complexities between them.
At the end of chapter 4, on page 120, Bechdel is looking at photos of her father when he was in his early twenties, and a photo of her on her 21st birthday. In the accompanying text, Bechdel ponders the similarities between the photos, their demeanors, and who might’ve taken the photos themselves. I think this scene stood out to me because though Bechdel had a disjointed relationship with her father, she continued to look for connections with him. The need for connection with parental figures is powerful, and I feel the text as a whole wrestles with the complexity of desiring this connection despite associated flaws or problems that arise within the relationship. Bechdel had moments where she really wanted to be in communication with her father, and there were other times where she definitely focused on his flaws and the things he did wrong in his life. The reflective tone of this scene really prompted me to pause and think about the almost melancholic realization that Bechdel has that she has similarities to her father, even though he was not expressive of them during their time together.
The scene that set the tone for how I would read the rest of the book occurred on page 59, in which the main character is told by her mother about her father’s many affairs with other men. She is told this almost immediately after coming out to her family, something she hoped would give her a sense of freedom from the strange pressures of her parents. The line that resonated strongly with me was when she explains “I had imagined my confession as an emancipation from my parents, but instead I was pulled back into their orbit,” (59). This line really speaks to the ease with which a parent-child relationship can become hostile, even when the intentions are not necessarily bad. I think Bechdel uses this seen to capture the essence of a relationship that both the parent and child want, but neither can seem to achieve.
A moment from Fun Home that continued to guide my reading of the rest of the text was page 57, at the beginning of the third chapter, when Bechdel depicts a dictionary opened to the word “queer.” The dictionary, revealed by Bechdel’s accompanying commentary to be Merriam-Webster, does not include a definition of “queer” in relation to sexuality or gender. This page stuck with me throughout the rest of the text for a couple reasons. First, the majority of the page is occupied by the typography of the dictionary, which echoes how Bechdel’s relationship with her father, especially as she gets into high school and college, is dictated by literature. Additionally, the absence of the LGBTQ+ definition of queer, juxtaposed with the inclusion of the more general definitions, parallels the family’s overwhelming lack of communication about the queerness in its midst. Although Bechdel explores her own sexuality and learns about her father’s experiences, her family is reluctant to do so. This page serves as a pivotal point for Bechdel’s personal journey in comparison to her family, where she recognizes the lack of acknowledgment that her family has shown to queerness and strives to establish her own knowledge and identity, so it resonates throughout the rest of the graphic novel.
The particular scene that spoke to me was Pages 51-53, which covered the moment the speaker and her brothers saw their father during an open casket viewing. I thought it captured well both the humorous and familiar relationship Bechdel has with death and the complex relationship she has with her father – she doesn’t express grief in the traditional sense of the term (staying dry-eyed, only looking at the open casket with her brothers “as long as we sensed it was appropriate”), but still feels a sense of something missing, expressed through the comment about the barber.
A scene that grabbed my attention from Fun Home is on page 148, in which Alison is looking at her dead distant cousin’s body. Alison Bechdel has expressed earlier how large her extended family gets simply because the town is so small and her family has a long history in the town. When three people die in a car crash on Route 150, it’s a big deal because Fun Home has never had a “triple feature”. This use of language to describe an immense amount of death shows a disconnection Alison has from death because of her upbringing. Something is brought up within her when she looks at the dead body of a distant cousin who is her age. It seems that she relates to him in some manner, and looking at his graying skin is bringing out some of her humanity. When writing in her journal for that day, the entry is almost completely obscured. This obscuring of the message shows how much the death messed with Alison’s sense of reality and grief. It seems like an out of body experience in which she does trust her mind and what is going on with reality, which is truly terrifying.
A scene that changed my perspective of reading Funhome was on page 86. When Alison is talking about the motivation behind her father’s suicide. Wanting to continue to believe it was in a way her fault to keep their connection alive. This perspective of interactions stayed with me throughout the entire book. Even though the relationship she had with her father was so painful; all the different ways she tries to keep their relationship alive (even after he is gone) fascinates me. Through books, english classes, writing letter, and just taking care and spending time with a him. Additionally, how being gay divides them as well as unites them in the end. All of this brought me to the conclusion of how elastic love can be, even if someone is horrible to you.
Captured in pages 117-118, the scene in the diner when baby Allison sees a butch woman for the first time struck me as significant to the rest of the text, particularly in the thread of Allison’s gender presentation and sexuality.
From a narrative standpoint, this scene can also be viewed as planting the seed for Allison’s sexual identity. Seeing this woman was not, of course, the source of her butchness and lesbianism, nor the start of her exploration and acceptance, but sparked the subliminal desire for butchness that the reader sees earlier in the book. Since the book is nonlinear, until this point the subject of Allison’s gender presentation is implied to be related to her lesbianism, based off the knowledge that she is a lesbianism along with how her fashion sense foils her father’s, but was not confirmed. This scene provides solid confirmation that refutes any notion she could have just been a tomboy or retaliating against her father’s desires, recontextualizing any point after this moment (or previously in the text) as a subliminal desire to achieve this role and presentation within the lesbian community.
One scene I felt particularly drawn to was the bottom right panel on page 226. In it, Alison stands in front of her father’s grave soon after he dies. There is a temporary grave marker there, soon to be replaced by the granite obelisk. The corn in the background is low to the ground and Alison is wearing sport shorts and a t-shirt. It seemed to encompass the cycles Alison and her father live in during this book. She describes herself at one point as starting her life when her father ended his, which can be seen in how the corn is new, barely blooming, when he is buried. And the temporary grave marker is packed with meaning.
Not only is it a placard provided by her own father’s funeral home, the word funeral abbreviated to “fun’l”, the letters on it seem to be replaceable and rearrangeable. It appears to be a marquee letter sign, with the appropriate letters swapped in to represent both any person and no one in specific. This image seems to show how death reduced the complex character of Bruce Bechdel to something temporary. It emphasizes how fleeting and simple Alison’s relationship to her father seemed to be, even though it in actuality was much deeper.
Pages 100-102 of Fun Home describe a photo Alison finds after her father’s death, of Roy, their old babysitter. She notices first that she isn’t as affected (outraged) by the photo and the inappropriate relationship between her father and Roy that it implies. She then notices the halfhearted attempt to censor or hide the photos by her father by crossing out dates and placing the photo with others from the same vacation. This reflection on her father and his relationship with the rest of the family set up more of Bechdel’s attempts to square her experiences with her father with her own life. When she concludes that the family photos and the photo of Roy are two sides of the same coin, she begins to make clear how she has come to think of her father. Not only does she see her father as a more whole person than either image would suggest, she also sees herself, as a part of the family, as one part of what makes her father who he is. She draws parallels between herself and her father throughout the book, but this one feels more direct than many of them. She combines experience with her reflection with background from other work in this moment, giving you a point to look in at how the rest of the book will work before she moves on.
Early into the story on page 31, Alison describes how her accomplished mother and father remained in her father’s hometown. On this page, we see that Bruce’s family chose to stay in the same area with Alison’s cousin moving right next to their mother, her aunt, Sue. Alison says “It was made clear that my brothers and I would not repeat their mistake” and her mother says “Don’t you kids get any ideas about dragging a trailer into the backyard. After you graduate from high school I don’t want to see you again.” Although it initially seems like Helen, her mother is cold and distant, it grows into an attempt to protect her children. As the story progresses we see that staying in her hometown would only prove to be a burden just as it had been for her father. This is emphasized on page 125 when someone tells her “the lord moves in mysterious ways” the wishes she could say “He killed himself because he was a manic-depressive, closeted fag and he couldn’t face living in this small-minded small town one more second.” Alison understands the effect that living in a small town had on her father and likely could have on herself too. Thus, when her mother tells her to move away it emphasizes the idea that moving away, through vacations, the threat of moving states when her father goes to court, and leaving for college, will give her a good start for a life of self-understanding while processing the complex relationship between her and her father.
At the end of Chapter 3, on page 86, I was drawn to the two panels that were about the timing of Bruce Bechdel’s death, following a brief discussion on the previous page about the parallels between his circumstance and the death of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Alison chooses to reject the idea, however, that her father modeled his death after Fitzgerald because it would mean it had nothing to do with her and break that last remaining tie between them. I think this is an interesting scene to observe the whole text through because it has an underlying desperation for connection in any way, shape, or form. The visuals depict a young Alison writing, presumably in her diary, and Bruce reading Zelda. One angle is from inside the house and the other is from outside. The father and daughter look remarkably similar in their focus and expression. Yet, there is an almost cold distance between them. The panel speaks to how even in close proximity within a room and through bonds over literature, the two never had the family dynamic or closeness that Alison longed for. There is also distance in their queer identities. Upon Alison’s letter, the communication between her and Bruce is sparse and vague. Since they never bond over sexuality, Alison conjures a viable connection that her coming out at least partly caused her father’s death, eliciting some emotional response rather than none.
The particular scene of Fun Home that caught my attention was the final panels on page 232, where a young Allison is leaping into the arms of her father, who is waiting in the pool below. Here, Allison and her father are compared to Icarus, a figure from Greek mythology who serves as a symbol of pride, hubris, and ultimately, knowing when to stop yourself. In mythology, Daedalus attempts to stop Icarus, his son, from flying too close to the sun, and is unable to catch him, and Icarus falls dead into the sea. In Fun Home, Bechdel’s father tries to stop her from pursuing her more “queer” interests, such as dressing in more masculine clothing, because he has struggled with his own homosexual identity for his entire life. When he dies, Allison’s father ‘drops’ into the sea as Icarus did. However, Bechdel also poses the question: “What if Icarus hadn’t hurtled into the sea? What if he’d inherited his father’s inventive bent? What might he have wrought?.” In this situation, the “Icarus” is Bechdel herself, who is leaping into the pool where her father awaits. This is very symbolic of the similarities between Bechdel and her father – both are queer, and that is an undeniably dangerous leap to make. However, through Bechdel’s unique connection with her father, she is able to make the leap of faith into his waiting arms at the end of the novel and fully embrace her identity and their complex relationship that was developed throughout the entire book.
The scene on pages 220 and 221 in which Bechdel finally broaches the subject of sexuality directly with her father during a car ride to a theater stood out to me. This is an important moment in terms of their relationship—as her father opens up to her verbally about his sexuality for the first time and she draws connections to him for the first time aloud—and it also symbolizes the style of the novel itself—Bechdel’s allusions to various literary works, which is what brought her and her father together. However, what stood out to me the most in this scene was the illustration. While it’s easy to get focused on Bechdel’s words, the art really complements and enhances the narrative. I found it was easy to glance at the illustrations to just glean base-level information, but in these two pages, the repetition draws your eyes to the illustrations. From frame to frame, there are subtle differences between each character’s facial expressions and body language, but also similarities. For example, these are three panels without any words and, in them, their similarities in appearance and body language are highlighted. While the words in this scene matter a lot, Bechdel’s illustrations tell a story even without the words, demonstrating that sometimes the most important things are observed and not said. This scene opened my eyes to the brilliance of Bechdel’s illustrations, which I hadn’t been fully appreciating before.
A moment that stood out to me was on page 211 and it’s the scene of Alison’s father’s letter after Alison announced she was lesbian. This scene was striking to me because while her father is talking about The Odyssey, he uses it as a metaphor to truly explain his feelings without having to explicitly state them. Bechdel also makes an effort to show conflicting emotions on the father’s behalf. In the letter, Alison’s father makes the inference that Alison already knew about his queerness. In relation to the entire text, Alison was an observer of her father throughout the course of her upbringing. This sort of connection that Alison and her father are more similar than either wants to admit to forms a deeper connection than both party’s allow to take place. It’s also symbolic that her father admits to all of this in a letter, rather than speaking it to Allison. Moreover, within the whole text, Alison’s father was never open about many aspects of his life and Alison had always been reaching out to connect with him.
I was particularly fascinated by Bechdel’s description of her journals throughout her struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Particularly on pages 141-143, she explains how she started writing “I think” next to all of her statements as if she didn’t trust her own reliability. She then develops a shorthand version to go in between the words, then on top of the words, and then over the entire page. This is the process of her descent into a headspace of uncertainty and instability, in which she feels she cannot truly be sure of anything. It was distressing to read because it is tragic for anyone, especially a child, to not feel grounded in reality. Bechdel was terrified of writing anything that was untrue, and so she developed a safety net which meant she could not be questioned. If later she found out she had remembered something wrong, she had the automatic defense that she only “thought”, that she wasn’t “sure”. This epidemic of “I think” speaks to all of Bechdel’s childhood, specifically her relationship with her family. Her compulsions for even numbers of floorboards and water droplets were undoubtedly a way of gaining control in the hostile and unpredictable environment of her home. However, they became more extreme when she started to question her own reality. This is just one way in the text in which Bechdel’s mental health is affected by her family’s dynamic. Throughout the entire book, her emotions and patterns of behavior shift as her family changes.
The scene that stood out most to me was when Alison realized she never wanted to conventionally marry anyone after seeing her parent’s marriage, at the top of page 74 when she realizes she is a lesbian. This way of finding out about her queerness, through literature, particularly was of interest to me. Throughout the rest of the novel, we learn that the only tangible way that Alison has any relationship to her father is through books and their shared queer identity. Both of these tie back to her own self-discovery, and Alison’s exploration of herself only fleshes out further for the remainder of the novel.
The way this changed my thinking about the text was critical: without this realization of her sexuality, she never would have had a deeper tie to her father. Thus, Alison’s relationship to her queerness being juxtaposed to her father’s for the rest of the text works to further elevate and heighten the complexities between them.
At the end of chapter 4, on page 120, Bechdel is looking at photos of her father when he was in his early twenties, and a photo of her on her 21st birthday. In the accompanying text, Bechdel ponders the similarities between the photos, their demeanors, and who might’ve taken the photos themselves. I think this scene stood out to me because though Bechdel had a disjointed relationship with her father, she continued to look for connections with him. The need for connection with parental figures is powerful, and I feel the text as a whole wrestles with the complexity of desiring this connection despite associated flaws or problems that arise within the relationship. Bechdel had moments where she really wanted to be in communication with her father, and there were other times where she definitely focused on his flaws and the things he did wrong in his life. The reflective tone of this scene really prompted me to pause and think about the almost melancholic realization that Bechdel has that she has similarities to her father, even though he was not expressive of them during their time together.
The scene that set the tone for how I would read the rest of the book occurred on page 59, in which the main character is told by her mother about her father’s many affairs with other men. She is told this almost immediately after coming out to her family, something she hoped would give her a sense of freedom from the strange pressures of her parents. The line that resonated strongly with me was when she explains “I had imagined my confession as an emancipation from my parents, but instead I was pulled back into their orbit,” (59). This line really speaks to the ease with which a parent-child relationship can become hostile, even when the intentions are not necessarily bad. I think Bechdel uses this seen to capture the essence of a relationship that both the parent and child want, but neither can seem to achieve.
A moment from Fun Home that continued to guide my reading of the rest of the text was page 57, at the beginning of the third chapter, when Bechdel depicts a dictionary opened to the word “queer.” The dictionary, revealed by Bechdel’s accompanying commentary to be Merriam-Webster, does not include a definition of “queer” in relation to sexuality or gender. This page stuck with me throughout the rest of the text for a couple reasons. First, the majority of the page is occupied by the typography of the dictionary, which echoes how Bechdel’s relationship with her father, especially as she gets into high school and college, is dictated by literature. Additionally, the absence of the LGBTQ+ definition of queer, juxtaposed with the inclusion of the more general definitions, parallels the family’s overwhelming lack of communication about the queerness in its midst. Although Bechdel explores her own sexuality and learns about her father’s experiences, her family is reluctant to do so. This page serves as a pivotal point for Bechdel’s personal journey in comparison to her family, where she recognizes the lack of acknowledgment that her family has shown to queerness and strives to establish her own knowledge and identity, so it resonates throughout the rest of the graphic novel.
The particular scene that spoke to me was Pages 51-53, which covered the moment the speaker and her brothers saw their father during an open casket viewing. I thought it captured well both the humorous and familiar relationship Bechdel has with death and the complex relationship she has with her father – she doesn’t express grief in the traditional sense of the term (staying dry-eyed, only looking at the open casket with her brothers “as long as we sensed it was appropriate”), but still feels a sense of something missing, expressed through the comment about the barber.