I believe that if Alison Bechdel’s memoir would have proceeded in a chronological order then reading it would not have had the same effect on the reader. Up until page 17, the reader can sense that something isn’t quite right with Bruce Bechdel. He could hardly be bothered to engage in a facile game of “airplane” (3) with his ten-year-old daughter. On page 6, Alison calls her father, “an alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a Daedalus of décor” because all of Bruce’s time and energy seem to center around perfecting his home. And on page 11, we get a brief glimpse of how quickly Bruce’s temper flares up and erupts as Alison yells out “don’t hit me” while the family is decorating the tree at Christmastime. But it isn’t until page 17 that a huge bomb gets dropped upon Alison’s readers that her father has sex with teenage boys. One could only speculate that her father might have been a closeted homosexual until we see get this shocking revelation as the Bechdel family attends church.
By revealing this upsetting information early on, Alison creates a cogent page turner that hastily grips her readers in its powerful clutches and refuses to let go. So now the reader knows that Alison’s father was a confined marriage man that had sex with …show more content…
She skirts around prominent events like her father’s copious affairs with boys and the details of his abrupt mortality. This assists in adding layers of realism to her story in the way that a human’s memory works. In reality, our brains don’t just focus on one event from our past and move on. Somehow, we fasten various situations and/or relationships multiple times that act as a centerpiece to a relatable theme that we once experienced. In Fun Home, the overall reoccurring presence of these climatic moments gives Bechdel’s graphic novel a lot of depth that lifts her story to the status of a great
By revealing this upsetting information early on, Alison creates a cogent page turner that hastily grips her readers in its powerful clutches and refuses to let go. So now the reader knows that Alison’s father was a confined marriage man that had sex with …show more content…
She skirts around prominent events like her father’s copious affairs with boys and the details of his abrupt mortality. This assists in adding layers of realism to her story in the way that a human’s memory works. In reality, our brains don’t just focus on one event from our past and move on. Somehow, we fasten various situations and/or relationships multiple times that act as a centerpiece to a relatable theme that we once experienced. In Fun Home, the overall reoccurring presence of these climatic moments gives Bechdel’s graphic novel a lot of depth that lifts her story to the status of a great