Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Chapter Two opens on a splash page of Bruce’s grave: an obelisk, a shape which he revered as a symbol of life when he was still alive.

Bechdel states, “There’s no proof, actually, that my father killed himself” (27). He was hit by a truck while crossing the street, and his death was ruled an accident. Alison wonders whether her father actually killed himself (a consideration she returns to throughout the book). She believes that he did intend to kill himself, but she will never know for sure. She notes that he was reading Camus’s A Happy Death in the days leading up to his death.

Bechdel presents a map of a mile and a half of her hometown, Beech Creek, which includes her father’s grave, the spot where he died, the house where he raised his family, and the farm where he was born. “This narrow compass suggests a provincialism on my father’s part that is both misleading and accurate” (30). Bechdel characterizes her parents as “cultured” and “urbane.”

Bruce and Helen Bechdel spent the first year of their marriage in West Germany due to Bruce’s service in the army. They returned to Pennsylvania after Bruce’s father had a heart attack. There, he took up the mantle of funeral director in his father’s stead. Both Helen and Bruce picked up teaching to cover the “part-time income” provided by funeral directing in a small town.

The Bechdels referred to the funeral home as the “fun home.” Alison recalls identifying with The Addams Family comics due to their casual proximity to death. She recalls doing lots of chores at the fun home as well as playing with her brothers there and spending the night with her paternal grandmother, who lived on-site. Alison and her brothers frequently pestered their grandmother to tell them a story from their father’s childhood, wherein he got stuck in a patch of mud.

Alison learned of her father’s death while she was at college. She writes that the incomprehensibility of his death was heightened by her proximity to death as a child. When she returned home for the funeral, she and her brother John greeted each other with “ghastly, uncontrollable grins,” (46). This moment stands in contrast to Alison’s inability to access emotion around her father’s death. She and her brothers remained “dry-eyed” at the funeral, and her prevailing emotional state was one of irritation.

The chapter ends on a sequence of Alison visiting her father’s grave alone and noting that he was “stuck in the mud for good this time” (54).

Chapter 3 opens on an illustration of a photograph of Helen Bechdel pictured with a male family member.

The first panel depicts a dictionary open on the entry for “queer,” introducing dictionary entries as a motif. Alison writes that her father’s death was “queer in every sense of that multivalent word […] But most compellingly at the time, his death was bound up for me with the one definition conspicuously missing from our mammoth Webster’s” (57).

Four months prior to her father’s death, Alison came out as a lesbian via letter. After coming out, Alison spoke to her mother on the phone and learned that her father “had affairs with other men” (58), including Alison’s childhood babysitter Roy. Her father never confessed his queerness to her directly. Alison wonders if her coming out influenced her father’s death by suicide.

Bruce often invited “promising” students to spend time with him in his home library. “The promise was very likely sexual in some cases, but whatever else might have been going on, books were being read” (61). This chapter introduces Bruce’s great fondness for F. Scott Fitzgerald as both an author and a historical figure. Alison compares her father to the titular Jay Gatsby of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in that he preferred fiction to reality. Alison also notes a number of coincidences around her father’s death and that of Fitzgerald’s.

Helen and Bruce met in college while performing in The Taming of the Shrew. Helen played the lead and continued to act throughout Alison’s upbringing. While her father is Fitzgeraldian, Alison compares her mother to a Henry James character: “a vigorous American idealist ensnared by degenerate continental forces” (66). When he was a young man, Bruce was in the army, stationed in West Germany. He wooed Helen with emphatic love letters. However, when she arrived in Germany to marry him, Bruce began to throw intense temper tantrums in which he berated her. These episodes continued throughout Alison’s childhood.

Alison discovered her lesbianism through books and research. Exploring her sexuality was a clandestine process that she characterizes as both rigorously academic and solitarily erotic. Her solitude dissolved when she worked up the courage to join the campus gay alliance. There, she meets her first girlfriend, Joan. They moved in together right before Bruce’s death. Joan accompanied Alison home for the funeral. Helen insisted on gifting Joan a book of Wallace Steven’s poems from Bruce’s collection.