Alison Bechdel's Best-Selling Graphic Memoir, Fun Home

Fun Home In Alison Bechdel’s best-selling graphic memoir Fun Home, it discusses a wide variety of topics throughout. Fun Home focuses on Alison Bechdel’s family life, the alleged suicide or accidental death of her father, her father’s inability to live the way he wanted to- to even including her coming-out story. The graphic memoir’s focus has to do with Alison’s father's secret life, and his inability to be who he truly wanted to be- and the issues that it caused on not only his life but Alison and her mother and brothers as well. Throughout Fun Home, there was a common trait Alison and her father shared and that was the fact they both liked the same sex. After finishing reading the graphic memoir, one question remained “Why was it …show more content…
He died when crossing the street, by getting hit by a bread truck. Alison felt as even if there wasn’t substantial proof that her dad killed himself, she still felt deep down it wasn’t an accident. According to Alison “There’s no proof, but there are some suggestive circumstances. The fact that my mother had asked him for a divorce two weeks before”. Bruce could have possibly felt that his whole life was crashing down right in front of him-the fact he couldn’t be who he truly wanted to be already dawned on him, but the possibility of losing the woman he was married to, could have become too much for him to handle. Alison believes a copy of Camus’ A Happy Death which her father would read and leave laying around the house could possibly “be construed as a deliberate manner “(Alison Bechdel). In Camus’ first novel it’s about a hero who dies an unhappy death. There was a line highlighted by Bruce that stated, “He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love-first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage”. That line to Alison described her parent’s marriage (pg. 28). Her parent’s marriage potentially transpired into a divorce, once Alison’s mother realized she couldn’t take it any …show more content…
To answer the question of “Why was it easy for Alison to come out and find a happy life as a gay woman, but her father remained closeted his entire life?” It seemed to have been easier for Alison to come out and be happy because she was able to experience a different way of growing up and was exposed to a lot more. She was able to truly accept who she was because she knew that just because she had feelings for a woman that did not make her a bad person. Unlike Alison, Bruce’s experience remained much different. He was unable to ever truly come out, and be himself. Bruce had a whole lot more to lose, compared to Alison. He for one grew up differently in an older time period, and he had an entire family. From what I’ve read, his inability to come out as a gay man, caused Bruce to do things he knew in a sense was not right. With him being molested by a farmhand at a young age, he always felt that he was a bad person. Rather than come out, and get help-it was too late. Fate had something else for him. Fun Home consisted of many trials and tribulations for Alison and her family, but she was able to overcome it. This graphic memoir expresses the true to what many people experience yet to this day. Alison Bechdel’s memoir named “Fun Home, A Family Tragicomic” was a deep graphic novel that showed the many up’s and down’s many face, but what I find admirable is the fact, she was willing to speak on something that others might be afraid to open