Bechdel's Song Welcome Home-Radical Face

Welcome Home - Radical Face This song fits nicely with the part of the book when Bechdel comes back for her father’s funeral. She comes home to old memories of working with her dad and playing with her brothers. She also revisits old relationships with her relatives that have been completely or slightly severed. In ‘Welcome Home’, the singer also addresses the topic of old relationships, ‘Ships are launching from my chest, Some have names but most do not, If you find one, please let me know what piece I've lost’. The lyrics ‘You were never supposed to leave, Now my head's splitting at the seams’, relate to the way Bechdel reacts to her father’s death. She had never thought about him dying, and the fact that he did set her off on this path of trying to figure out what happened. The very last line of the song sums up the very first part of the book. Bechdel and her father are playing …show more content…
The lyrics ‘He took a lover on a faraway beach, While you arranged flowers and chose color schemes’, is very similar to what happened between Bechdel’s parents. During a vacation Bechdel took with her father and brothers, her father had an affair with their babysitter, Roy. Bechdel’s mother was left alone at the house to work. The next part of the song is where the two stories don’t match up quite as well. In the song, the mother is attending a wedding when the bride breaks a vase that the mother had placed there, thinking it would spend the years resting perfectly on the shelf. This is the last straw, and she drowns herself in the ocean. Bechdel also believes that her father killed himself for what he might have thought was the last straw - Alison coming out as a lesbian and finding out about his affairs with younger