Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Nonfiction | Graphic Memoir | Adult | Published in 2006

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-5

Chapters 6-7

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 6 Summary: “The Ideal Husband”

Chapter 6 opens on a splash page of Helen doing her makeup in the mirror.

This chapter hinges on a pubescent Alison’s diary entries, which provide first-hand accounts of a particularly pivotal summer. “There was a lot going on that summer. I’m glad I was taking notes. Otherwise I’d find the degree of synchronicity implausible” (154).

The first entry Bechdel presents is one wherein she discovered that her father is attending court ordered psychiatric appointments. When she asked him why he had to go, he responded: “I’m bad. Not good like you” (153). Bechdel reveals that he was charged with “furnishing a malt beverage to a minor” (175). Other events from the summer include the emergence of the 17-year cicadas, the Watergate scandal, Alison’s first period, and Helen’s performance as Lady Bracknell in a local production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

The police report describing Bruce’s infraction made no mention of a sexual element of his crime. Bechdel compares her father’s trial to that of Oscar Wilde’s: “My father did not provoke a burst of applause in the courtroom, as Oscar Wilde had, with an impassioned plea for understanding of ‘such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan’” (180).

During this time, young Alison began seriously exploring men’s clothing. She read men’s fashion magazines and took advantage of her father’s absence in the house to dress up in his clothes. She once manage to convince a friend to dress up and pretend to be men with her, but it was a brief experiment.

In her diary, young Alison was reluctant to write frankly about her pubescence and sexuality. She referred to both masturbation and menstruation as “Ning,” derived from “n” as a symbol for an unknown quantity in algebra. Bechdel notes that her younger self sometimes lied and omitted details in her diary: “My narration had by this point become altogether unreliable” (184). She also stopped recording things in her diary for “weeks at a time” (186). Bechdel refers to this absence as “the implicit lie of the blank page” (186).

Chapter 7 Summary: “The Antihero’s Journey”

Chapter 7 opens on a splash page of an illustrated photograph of young Alison jumping into a pool. Her father is already in the water, and his arms are outstretched to catch her.

Alison, her brothers, and Bruce traveled to New York City for the Fourth of July in 1976. This time, they stay with a female friend of Bruce and Helen’s. Alison, now 15 years old, recognized the neighborhood’s flourishing gay scene. At one point, her brother John wandered off alone. He returned safely after being followed by a “chickenhawk” on Christopher Street. Bruce was “uncharacteristically eager to forgive and forget” (193) this transgression.

As a high school senior, Alison enrolled in her father’s English class. Despite her reluctance to engage with her father’s reading choices Alison proved to be an apt pupil, and she enjoyed her father’s lessons. Literature became a point of bonding between them. They grew closer after Alison left for college, although Bruce continued to be pedantic to the point of tedium.

In one of her college courses, Alison was assigned James Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce was among Bruce’s favorite authors. The Ulysses sections of this chapter are dense with wordplay and literary allusions. The most significant of these include Alison comparing her exploration of her queerness to The Odyssey and the connection she draws between her relationship with her father and the “spiritual” father-son dynamic of Joyce’s Stephen and Bloom.

Alison returned home for the holidays after coming out. Her mother confided in her that she wanted a divorce. Alison also briefly bonded with her father about childhood gender nonconformity and their queer experiences, although very little was actually said on the subject. He tried to take her to a gay bar, but they were turned away at the door because Alison was under 21. At the end of the semester, Alison visited home again. This time, she brought Joan with her, but she did not introduce her as her girlfriend.

The book ends on a sequence of young Alison swimming with her father. These images are overlayed with Bechdel’s musings on James Joyce as well as a return to the similarity between herself and her father and Daedalus and Icarus.

Chapters 6-7 Analysis

Chapter 7 takes pains to highlight the coded way Bruce shows affection to his daughter. The most obvious example is the exchange of books. He repeatedly recommends books to Alison and offers her texts from his library. Like the books depicted in earlier chapters, they appear incidental, but by the end of the novel it becomes obvious that these gestures were his attempt to make inroads with his daughter. “Dad didn’t have much use for small children, but as I got older, he began to sense my potential as an intellectual companion.” (198). In Chapter 1, Bechdel muses that her father regarded his small children as ornamental “extensions of himself” and wonders how much he truly cared for them.

The aloof manner with which Bruce handles his young children appears in stark contrast to the shame that impedes him from speaking openly with a college-aged Alison. Prior to her coming out, Alison’s father gives her a copy of Colette’s autobiography, a book that includes overtly sapphic themes. Colette’s writings became a staple of Alison’s self-discovery as a lesbian. When she asks her father, “I wonder if you knew what you were doing when you gave me that Collette book?” (220), he is reluctant to respond: “What? Oh. I didn’t, really. It was just a guess. […] I guess there was some kind of… identification” (220). Even in the form of a confession, Bruce’s language is vague and cryptic.