Apparently, I didn’t kick the nasty cold I had before Thanksgiving break in the teeth hard enough because it’s coming back. Which is to say — my head’s a poundin’. I wanted to write a wee bit about Alison Bechdel’s book Fun Home tonight; I’ll try to be brief though.
I wrote an essay on Fun Home back in 2008, I think? (Geez that seems forever ago). I still plan on publishing it but the essay needs some significant revisions.
First of all — I LOVE this book. It’s just masterfully done. And, I’m even more psyched about her new one coming out this May: Are You My Mother? Clearly, Bechdel’s playing off of Dr. Seus’s book which I read over and over and over again as a child. I’m anxious to read this new book & her portrayal of her mother.
There are a lot of links and images I’d like to include here but wordpress is being weird about letting me do that right now. They’ve changed the format here significantly so it might just be that I need to relearn how to utilize this space. At any rate, forgive the omissions of images and whatnot.
Here’s a little excerpt from my writings on Fun Home from three years ago. Note I refer to Bechdel as the author of this work and Alison as the character she presents in it. The distinction, I think, is important:
“Nancy K. Miller observes in Fun Home that ‘From beginning to end, the father-daughter bond takes the form of a knot that cannot be untied — in life or in autobiography” (from her PMLA article pg. 543) Despite their generational and gender differences, Alison and her dad share many similarities: both grow up in the same town, share gender identifications with the opposite sex, try to foist their desired fashion sensibilities onto one another, enjoy reading literature, and experience same-sex desire. Bechdel portrays herself as having a very close relationship with her father, in spite of his impersonal nature. The first panels in Fun Home, in fact, show father-daughter playing “airplane” together. Alison turns this image of herself flying above her dad into a mythic reversal of the tale of Icarus, indicating that her father will fall instead of her. Eventually, however, Alison loses her balance and falls off the human pedestal he provides for her. Just as Miller and Bechdel herself suggest, the fate of both father and daughter in this autobiography become entangled in a knot. The relationship between Bruce’s death and Bechdel’s ending of the book is not causal.”
“Alison grows up in the same small town as her father, but instead of inheriting the cruel reality that propels him toward death, as he inherits the family funeral home, she finds a way to work through her trauma. Bechdel admits to herself and her readers that she, too, would consider taking he own life if she had to endure the same silent existence as her father. Even if only joked about, she can imagine her way out of this death wish by fantasizing about what she would like to say to her grieving mourners, if she felt the freedom to do so. That which deteriorates her father’s will to live, Alison discovers, can be altered by the imagination. The mystery of her father’s death, too, can be investigated through imaginative acts. The hybridity of the form Bechdel’s book takes, as both an autobiography as well as a graphic narrative, allows her to likewise create and mix different versions of what might have caused her father’s death. Images of Bruce working as a mortician in ‘fun home’ juxtaposed with his own funeral service in it, suggest that being trapped within close proximity to both his family and the funeral business corresponds to his desire to no longer be. Yet, the story that her grandmother repeatedly told about how her father got stuck in the mud when he was a toddler causes Alison to wonder if he had always felt that way. What compelled Bruce to jump backwards onto the highway, causing a Sunbean bread truck to literally plow him down, remains a mystery. But, Alison notes one thing for certain — he’s ‘stuck in the mud for good this time’ (54).
In one of the more dominate alternate versions of this story, her dad’s demise corresponds with her coming out as a lesbian. Alison fears her announcement ‘I am a lesbian’ cosmically altered her father’s universe, catapulting him into the middle of a highway.”
I, of course, have MUCH more to say on the subjects Bechdel brings up in her graphic memoir. But for now, I’ll leave it there. Ciao.
