Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) is a graphic novel memoir written and illustrated by underground cartoonist Alison Bechdel. The book centers on Bechdel’s relationship with her late father Bruce Allen Bechdel, who died in what she believes was a death by suicide. Fun Home is a non-linear narrative that rehashes events from Alison Bechdel’s youth and adolescence. Her memories are presented in the comic panels, overlayed with her prosaic, retrospective musings in text boxes and captions. Much of Fun Home consists of Bechdel’s adolescent discovery of her homosexuality, which parallels her father’s own closeted queerness. The novel deals with themes of queer sexuality, gender nonconformity, familial dysfunction, artifice, death, and self-exploration.

Fun Home is a highly decorated publication. The New York Times, The Times, New York Magazine, and Publishers Weekly all named it the best comic book of 2006. Entertainment Weekly named it the best nonfiction book of 2006, and Time Magazine named it the best book of 2006. It also garnered numerous awards, including the GLAAD Media Award, the Stonewall Book Award, the Publishing Triangle-Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and an Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work. In 2013, Fun Home was adapted into an Off-Broadway stage musical that later debuted on Broadway in 2015. Both runs received numerous awards, including five Tonys. Fun Home is also the focus of numerous banning attempts due to its sexual themes and imagery.

Content Warning: this book includes descriptions and images of sex, masturbation, abuse, death, death by suicide, anti-queer bias, and familial dysfunction. This book also contains strong language, including anti-queer slurs and pejoratives. 

Plot Summary

Chapter 1, “Old Father, Old Artificer,” opens on young Alison and her father playing “airplane.” This chapter introduces the parallelism between Alison and her father and Icarus and Daedalus of Greek myth. This chapter focuses heavily on Bruce’s obsessive interest in historical restoration. It also introduces him as a closeted gay man and his proclivity to sleep with teenage boys.

Chapter 2, “A Happy Death,” is concerned largely with Bruce’s death and his part-time career as a funeral director. Bechdel recalls a childhood spent around corpses and death paraphernalia. She also recalls struggling with emotional detachment. Both of the Bechdel parents were highly literate English teachers. Thus, this chapter introduces books and literature as a reoccurring motif.

Chapter 3, “That Old Catastrophe,” focuses on Alison’s mother, Helen Augusta. This chapter also includes the first depiction of Alison coming out to her parents as a lesbian. She goes into detail about how her parents met and the circumstances of their marriage. She also discusses her own discovery of her sexuality and her first relationship in college.

Chapter 4, “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower,” focuses on Alison and her father as inversions of one another. It also introduces the snake as a symbol of duality, life, and death. In this chapter, Bechdel recalls going on vacation with her brothers, her father, and her father’s lovers. She also encounters photographs of her father in his youth: one of him cross-dressing, and one of him sunbathing.

Chapter 5, “The Canary-Colored Caravan of Death,” introduces the motif of sunrises and sunsets. It also hinges on themes of creativity, compulsion, and perception. Alison describes her father’s controlling nature and how it negatively impacted her exploration of art as a child. She also describes a year-long episode of childhood OCD.

Chapter 6, “The Ideal Husband,” recounts a particularly busy summer in the Bechdel family’s history. While Helen participated in a local production of The Importance of Being Earnest, Bruce was sentenced to court-appointed therapy sessions after providing a teenage boy with alcohol. This is also the summer that Alison got her first period. This chapter relies on her diary entries as both a source of information and a narrative device.

Chapter 7, “The Antihero’s Journey,” focuses on the emotional intimacy that developed between Alison and her father in the years prior to his death. They were able to bond over a shared love of literature; they also briefly confided in one another about their queer experiences.