It took me a few chapters for me to figure out what Bechdel’s biography Fun Home reminded me of. It reminds me of the comparative literature papers I would write when I was an undergraduate. There were few things I enjoyed about my major more than finding the links between stories. As I read Fun Home, I started to see that Bechdel was drawing links between her life, her father’s life, and novels as diverse as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu). It might seem pretentious at first glance, but it really fits. Fun Home is recursive, jumping around in time to link and explicate events in the Bechdels’ life. This is a fantastic book. From the plain, rough illustrations (this book is told as a graphic novel), you might expect a simple story. Fun Home is anything but. And if the story itself doesn’t get you, the ending certainly will. It’s shattering.
Fun Home is as much about secrets as it is about memory. Because she came of age in the 1980s, Bechdel was able to be up front about her sexuality. Her father couldn’t. As Alison circles around her childhood and her father’s life, you pick up on the fact that Bechdel the elder is desperately unhappy. He spends all his free time perfecting the family home, turning it into a Victorian showpiece. He makes a few abortive attempts to make “friends” with younger men, but they never turn out well. Because he lives in a small town and because he’s locked himself into the role of mid-century pater familias, Father Bechdel lives out his life of quiet desperation. Well, I say “lives out” but there is some question about whether the circumstances of his death were entirely accidental. Alison writes that her support system of friends and family (to some extent) was what let her come out. Her father, she writes, never felt that. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to learn that a family member felt that they had to live with such a big secret, rather than being their natural self.