What struck me as interesting in reading Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was how her memoir seemed to be focused on her father Bruce. His story is so thoroughly entwined with her understanding of her own, that it seems she cannot accurately talk about her own life without talking about his. As estranged from her father as she felt her whole life, his story seemed to define her own more than any other figure.
I am not sure if this entwining was her intent when she set out to tell write her “tragicomic” memoir, or if it was an organic result of committing her life to paper. I believe that in hindsight she obviously felt there was more of a connection between herself and her father because of the discovery of their shared homosexuality, but I think things go deeper than just that.
For better or for worse, the text seems to reveal (whether this is the author’s intent or not is immaterial) that it was not this singular similarity, but in fact the vast ocean of differences between them that defined Bechdel’s understanding of her life. We are constantly given instances of how different they are from each other, and how he never fit her understanding of masculinity, fatherhood, or love. She even remarks at one point that she felt like she was treated like furniture, just another part of his house. Yet his presence appears more central in her memoir than even her own. His presence, both in the literal physical sense and the metaphorical metaphysical sense, is the fulcrum upon which Bechdel’s life pivots in the text.
Even Bechdel’s understanding of her homosexuality seems to be completely inseparable from her father. He provides the book that helps propel her understanding of her own sexual identity. His coming out overshadows and redefines her own. His death changes her perspective on her own life. Bruce’s life is so intricately entwined with Bechdel’s understanding of her life that his comes to define hers in this memoir.
Phineas,
I’m totally with you on everything you said, but I guess maybe I looked at it in a slightly different way. Or rather, I didn’t go into the book thinking it was Alison’s memoir so much as the entire Bechdel family’s (“a family tragicom”). So, in some ways, I expected the book to be a view of everyone in her family, as well as herself, and it’s understandable that her father takes a foremost place in the narrative because of the obviously large impact he left on everyone in the family, and the way in which he abruptly left their lives.
If anything, I found it extremely odd that not more was said about her brothers. She has some mentions of them, but it seems only circumstantial to her being there, as with the story of them all going to the beach with Roy and the woods with Bill, when she asks her brother to call her Albert while they are at the mine, and how she and John smiled at each other at their father’s funeral. I mean, with her obsession with masculinity, why wouldn’t she be more interested in the impact of her father’s personality and eccentricities on her brothers? Of course, the book is obviously subjective in its narration, commenting mostly on the relationship she shares with her parents, but I would have thought there would be at least more of a mention of the relationship she shared with her brothers. In fact, one of the only instances we get of her relationship with family besides her parents is the small anecdote about how her cousins called her “butch.” I guess I just thought that with all her talk about being a piece of furniture to be placed and dealt with as her father desired, she would have actually addressed the matter of whether or not her brother were treated in this regard, and to this extent.
My other kind of nagging question about the text has to do with the flow of information about her father’s life. I assume that much of the “inside information” about her father’s lewd dealings came from her mother, but we get no indication of how her mother came across all of these things. Did Bruce simply tell Alison’s mother about all the affairs one day? Or did she just know all along? I imagine some of the scenes of Bruce in the army having an exchange with another army dude were purely Alison’s creation off of stories or the way she imagined her father would act, but I can’t know for sure. After reading Maus I am very sensitive to the when/where/how information in relayed in order to come to the final product of the graphic narrative. With /Fun Home/ I feel a little like Alison is some omniscient narrator simply “knowing” intimate details of her father’s life. Not to say that she doesn’t ever address this; on page 29 we get a scene of Alison and her mother discussing her father’s death, and then later when Alison is on the phone with her mother we get an overt declaration of her father’s homosexuality, but I’m just not always as aware of where I’m getting my information from as, say, in Maus.
Kristine,
I agree we don’t get much of a sense of the mother, but I think Alison has sympathy and empathy for her. She draws her mother’s passport picture on 71 as vital, engaged, and large-eyed, and then compares it with the dull-eyed, passive graying woman in the group passport photo on 72.
-Deb
I see how her father overshadows Bechdel in this graphic novel memoir. You mentioned briefly that her own coming out, meant to her to distance herself from her family, only allows her family to “do her one better” by shocking her with her father’s veiled homosexuality. I think that’s a particularly important passage to look at when talking about the importance of Bechdel within her own work. Her story seems to be a catalyst by which she can share the story of her dad, which she’s only beginning to come to terms with…I think.
Building on this idea of the mostly seen-but-not-heard brothers, I was struck by the middle panel on page 50, in which Alison returns home from college after her father’s death. She notes how she and her little brother, John, greeted each other with grins. Her older brother, Christian, is also in the panel, in the far left. He looks so much like her father that at first I thought he was Bruce, kind of haunting the scene.
Visually, at least, her brothers seem to be a reminder of her father’s presence, and I wonder if that might somehow play into their surprising absence in the narrative.