Fun Home

"But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories,

he was there to catch me when I leapt"

Fun Home is a graphic novel about the life story of author Alison Bechdel. It was written and illustrated by Bechdel herself. Bechdel tells the story of her life and her relationship with her family. She starts off with giving the reader a piece of information that she later expands upon in later chapters. This graphic novel is most certainly centered around her father, Bruce Bechdel, an english teacher, and his relationship to Alison, his oldest child. Throughout the novel Alison compares her father to author F. Scott Fitzgerald author of The Great Gatsby. As the story unfolds, the reader is introduced to many facets of her father's life. The novel starts off with Alison describing her father's restoration of their antique family home that her mother, Helen Bechdel, characterizes as a museum. During this time, the reader learns of Bruce's obsessive compulsive disorder that would sometimes lead to aggressive behavior toward his children. In the description of Alison's father compulsively restoring their home Alison compares their relationship to the Greek myth, Daedalus and Icarus. As a reader we immediately become aware of the resentment Alison has toward her father. In the first chapter, we learn her resentment comes from her father treating his furniture like children which, in turn, distances him as a father.

Chapter two, entitled, "Happy Death" is the introduction to the suicide of Alison's father when she was twenty years old. Bechdel used this to introduce the family business, a funeral parlor which the Bechdel family calls the "Fun Home." Bruce Bechdel's death came two weeks after his wife asked for a divorce and four months after Alison had came out to her parents as a lesbian. At this point in the novel, the similarities between Alison and her father become more pronounced. Alison learned after her father's death that he was a closeted homosexual who had relationships with young men while in the military and affairs with students and babysitters. We also learn of Alison's obsessive compulsive disorder which is similar to her father's.

Even though Alison and her father didn't have an emotional father-daughter relationship, they found a connection in the desire to have what the other did. In this case, Alison wanting to be more masculine while her father wanting to be more feminine. Alison and her father also bonded over education.   As a young child, Alison grew up around her father's library but as she grew older she was able to converse with her father about the books she had read in school or even ask what he would recommend. At the end of the novel we learn that even though Alison's father was manic depressive, obsessive compulsive, and a closeted homosexual that both their lives overlap in many ways. 

Characters

Narrator: Alison Bechdel

Father: Bruce Bechdel

Mother: Helen Bechdel

Brothers:

Christian and John Bechdel

Girlfriend: Joan

About the Author

Alison Bechdel was born in Pennsylvania in 1960. She is best known for her comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For and for her graphic novel, Fun Home.

Dykes to Watch Out For was first published in 1983 by a feminist newspaper called Womennews.

Fun Home was written in 2006 and was named one of "The Best 10 Books of the Year" by Time Magazine. It also won the Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work. It won the GLAAD Media Award in 2007 for Outstanding Comic Book. Fun Home has received many more awards. It has been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Hungarian, Korean, Polish and soon, Chinese.

Are You My Mother? was published in May 2012. Are You My Mother? is the sequel to Fun Home. In this graphic novel, Bechdel focuses on her relationship with her mother. In order to create this novel she suspended Dykes to Watch Out For in 2008.

Text vs. Pictures

Bechdel's style of drawing falls in the middle of the cartoon and the "realistic" end of Scott McCloud's spectrum. I think this definitely gives the reader enough information to understand the differences between characters but doesn't become too "realistic" to the point that the drawing would take away from the story. 

I believe Fun Home is duo-specific; the word to image ration is pretty even. However, there is far less dialogue in this novel. Most of the words are written above the panels for a more narrative feel.

Critical Analysis

As a whole, I think that Fun Home is a very successful graphic novel and I would recommend it. I enjoyed the chapter separation and the way Bechdel hinted at things in the beginning that would later be expanded upon. This left me wanting to read on.  The drawing was perfect for me as a reader and I enjoyed the noticeable separation between characters. I also enjoyed the use of black outline for the figures and blue ink wash for the background because it didn't distract me from the story.

In History

At first I didn't believe that Bechdel wrote this novel in response to any history during the early 2000s. I believed she wrote this work simply in response to her childhood and early adulthood, which still could be true. However in searching for comics during the same time period, I stumbled across an article about how DC Comics reintroduced Batwoman as a lesbian in 2006. Their reasoning behind this was to diversify the superhero. I do believe that by 2006 people had more tolerance for diversity which is why Bechdel was confidently able to write a graphic novel describing her father as a closeted homosexual and herself as a lesbian.  This could also be the reason why DC Comics felt confident to reintroduce Batwoman as a lesbian.