Fun Home
Encyclopedia
Fun Home is a 2006 graphic
memoir
by American writer Alison Bechdel
, author of the comic strip
Dykes to Watch Out For
. It chronicles the author's childhood and youth in rural Pennsylvania
, USA, focusing on her complex relationship with her father. The book addresses themes of sexual orientation
, gender role
s, suicide
, dysfunctional family
life, and the role of literature
in understanding oneself and one's family. Writing and illustrating Fun Home took seven years, in part because of Bechdel's laborious artistic process, which includes photographing herself in poses for each human figure.
Fun Home has been both a popular and critical success, and spent two weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list
. In The New York Times Sunday Book Review
, Sean Wilsey
called it "a pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics
and memoir) in multiple new directions." Several publications named Fun Home as one of the best books of 2006; it was also included in several lists of the best books of the 2000s. It was nominated for several awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award
and three Eisner Award
s (one of which it won). A French translation of Fun Home was serialized in the newspaper Libération
; the book was an official selection of the Angoulême International Comics Festival
and has been the subject of an academic conference in France. Fun Home has been the subject of numerous academic publications in areas such as biography studies and cultural studies
, as part of a larger turn towards serious academic investment in the study of comics
/sequential art
.
Fun Home also generated controversy: a public library in Missouri
removed Fun Home from its shelves for five months after local residents objected to its contents.
The narrative of Fun Home is non-linear
and recursive. Incidents are told and re-told in the light of new information or themes. Bechdel describes the structure of Fun Home as a labyrinth
, "going over the same material, but starting from the outside and spiraling in to the center of the story." In an essay on memoirs and truth in the academic journal
PMLA
, Nancy K. Miller
explains that as Bechdel revisits scenes and themes "she re-creates memories in which the force of attachment generates the structure of the memoir itself." Additionally, the memoir derives its structure from allusion
s to various works of literature, Greek myth
and visual arts
; the events of Bechdel's family life during her childhood and adolescence are presented through this allusive lens. Miller notes that the narratives of the referenced literary texts "provide clues, both true and false, to the mysteries of family relations."
The memoir focuses on Bechdel's family, and is centered around her relationship with her father, Bruce. Bruce Bechdel was a funeral director
and high school English
teacher in Beech Creek
, where Alison and her siblings grew up. The book's title comes from the family nickname for the funeral home
, the family business in which Bruce Bechdel grew up and later worked; the phrase also refers ironically to Bruce Bechdel's tyrannical domestic rule. Bruce Bechdel's two occupations are reflected in Fun Homes focus on death and literature.
In the beginning of the book, the memoir exhibits Bruce Bechdel's obsession with restoring the family's Victorian
home. His obsessive need to restore the house is connected to his emotional distance from his family, which he expressed in coldness and occasional bouts of abusive rage. This emotional distance, in turn, is connected with his closeted
homosexual
tendencies. Bruce Bechdel had homosexual relationships in the military and with his high school students; some of those students were also family friends and babysitters. At the age of 44, two weeks after his wife requested a divorce, he stepped into the path of an oncoming Sunbeam Bread
truck and was killed. Although the evidence is equivocal, Alison Bechdel concludes that her father committed suicide
.
The story also deals with Alison Bechdel's own struggle with her sexual identity, reaching a catharsis in the realization that she is a lesbian
and her coming out
to her parents. The memoir frankly examines her sexual development, including transcripts from her childhood diary
, anecdotes about masturbation
, and tales of her first sexual experiences with her girlfriend, Joan. In addition to their common homosexuality, Alison and Bruce Bechdel share obsessive-compulsive tendencies and artistic leanings, albeit with opposing aesthetic senses: "I was Sparta
n to my father's Athenian. Modern
to his Victorian. Butch
to his nelly. Utilitarian
to his aesthete
." This opposition was a source of tension in their relationship, as both tried to express their dissatisfaction with their given gender role
s: "Not only were we inverts
, we were inversions of each other. While I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him, he was attempting to express something feminine through me. It was a war of cross-purposes, and so doomed to perpetual escalation." However, shortly before Bruce Bechdel's death, he and his daughter have a conversation in which Bruce confesses some of his sexual history; this is presented as a partial resolution to the conflict between father and daughter.
At several points in the book, Bechdel questions whether her decision to come out as a lesbian was one of the triggers for her father's suicide. This question is never answered definitively, but Bechdel closely examines the connection between her father's closeted sexuality and her own open lesbianism, revealing her debt to her father in both positive and negative lights.
In addition to sexual orientation, the memoir touches on the theme of gender identity. Bechdel had viewed her father as "a big sissy"" while her father constantly tried to change his daughter into a more feminine person throughout her childhood. Through the exhibition of various feminine behaviors of Bechdel's father and various masculine behaviors of Bechdel, we see how the two are opposite of each other, opposite of each of their sex's roles, yet the same in their opposition.
The third, underlying theme of death is also portrayed. Though there is debate as to whether Bechdel's father's death was an accident or suicide, she thinks it much more likely that he killed himself ". Whether this was because of his own sexuality or Bechdel's (or some other cause) remains unclear.
and Icarus
. As a child, she confused her family and their Gothic Revival
home with the Addams Family
seen in the cartoons of Charles Addams
. Bruce Bechdel's suicide is discussed with reference to Albert Camus
' novel A Happy Death
and essay The Myth of Sisyphus
. His careful construction of an aesthetic and intellectual world is compared to The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
, and the narrator suggests that Bruce Bechdel modeled elements of his life after Fitzgerald's, as portrayed in the biography The Far Side of Paradise
. His wife Helen is compared with the protagonists of the Henry James
novels Washington Square
and The Portrait of a Lady
. Helen Bechdel was an amateur actress, and plays in which she acted are also used to illuminate aspects of her marriage. She met Bruce Bechdel when the two were appearing in a college production of The Taming of the Shrew
, and Alison Bechdel intimates that this was "a harbinger of my parents' later marriage". Helen Bechdel's role as Lady Bracknell in a local production of The Importance of Being Earnest
is shown in some detail; Bruce Bechdel is compared with Oscar Wilde
. His homosexuality is also examined with allusion to Marcel Proust
's In Search of Lost Time
. The father and daughter's artistic and obsessive-compulsive tendencies are discussed with reference to E. H. Shepard
's illustrations for The Wind in the Willows
. Bruce and Alison Bechdel exchange hints about their sexualities by exchanging memoirs: the father gives the daughter Earthly Paradise, an autobiographical collection of the writings of Colette
; shortly afterwards, in what Alison Bechdel describes as "an eloquent unconscious gesture", she leaves a library copy of Kate Millett
's memoir Flying for him. Finally, returning to the Daedalus myth, Alison Bechdel casts herself as Stephen Dedalus
and her father as Leopold Bloom
in James Joyce
's Ulysses
, with parallel references to the myth of Telemachus
and Odysseus
.
In addition to the literary allusions which are explicitly acknowledged in the text, Bechdel incorporates visual allusions to television programs and other items of pop culture into her artwork, often as images on a television in the background of a panel. These visual references include the film It's a Wonderful Life
, Bert and Ernie
of Sesame Street
, the Smiley Face, Yogi Bear
, Batman
, the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote
, the resignation of Richard Nixon
and The Flying Nun
.
and Author): In the book, Alison shows the reader different times in her and her father's life ; she does this starting from her and her father playing when she was just a little girl all the way to her adulthood. During the story, she talks about her strangled relationship with her father and her confusion as to why she believes that he killed himself. In the book, she also shows flashes of her personality, like her case of OCD. An important scene in the book is when she comes out to her parents. This is an emotional point in her life because she realizes she's doing the exact opposite of what her father had done.
Bruce Bechdel: Bruce is the father of Alison and her two brothers and was married to his wife Helen. While the book is based on Alison's life, it is emotionally centered on her father. During the book, Alison talks about her relationship with her father and what she believed were the physical causes and the underlying thoughts in her father's head before his death. In the book, it talks about how he had been having affairs with men ever since he was in the military. He was a closet homosexual and had never openly admitted to it to his family, causing much emotional strife. He was an English teacher, an actor, and a Funeral Director at Beech Creek. Throughout the book, it shows how he loved the book The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
and admires and strives to be like the main character in the book, Jay Gatsby. This was symbolic because at many points of the memoir Alison would come up with stunningly similar comparisons between the two men's lives. He would be seen doing work on the family's home to bring it back to the state that it once was. Two weeks after he has his divorce with his ex-wife, he is hit by a truck by the side of the road. Everyone but his daughter thought it was an accident while she thought it was suicide.
Helen Bechdel: Helen is the wife of Bruce and the mother of Alison. She appears throughout the book, sometimes giving Alison guidance. She is an actor, a writer, and an English teacher. In the book, she was shocked to find out that her daughter was gay and even grow upset over it. In the book her discontent with her uneventful life was shown in her progression through life through Alison's speculations.
Roy: Roy was one of Bruce's "friends" that would come over to help him around the house. Roy was really one of the affairs that Bruce had. He was also the babysitter.
with a gray-green ink wash
. Sean Wilsey wrote that Fun Homes panels "combine the detail and technical proficiency of R. Crumb
with a seriousness, emotional complexity and innovation completely its own." Writing in the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Diane Ellen Hamer contrasted "Bechdel's habit of drawing her characters very simply and yet distinctly" with "the attention to detail that she devotes to the background, those TV shows and posters on the wall, not to mention the intricacies of the funeral home as a recurring backdrop." Bechdel told an interviewer for The Comics Journal
that the richness of each panel of Fun Home was very deliberate:
Bechdel wrote and illustrated Fun Home over a seven-year period. Her meticulous artistic process made the task of illustration slow. She began each page by creating a framework in Adobe Illustrator
, on which she placed the text and drew rough figures. She used extensive photo reference
and, for many panels, posed for each human figure herself, using a digital camera
to record her poses. Bechdel also used photo reference for background elements. For example, to illustrate a panel depicting fireworks seen from a Greenwich Village
rooftop on July 4, 1976, she used Google Images to find a photograph of the New York skyline taken from that particular building in that period. She also painstakingly copied by hand many family photographs, letters, local maps and excerpts from her own childhood journal, incorporating these images into her narrative. After using the reference material to draw a tight framework for the page, Bechdel copied the line art illustration onto plate finish Bristol board
for the final inked page, which she then scanned into her computer. The gray-green ink wash for each page was drawn on a separate page of watercolor paper, and combined with the inked image using Photoshop. Bechdel chose the greenish wash color for its flexibility, and because it had "a bleak, elegiac quality" which suited the subject matter. Bechdel attributes this detailed creative process to her "barely controlled obsessive-compulsive disorder".
(Boston, New York
) on June 8, 2006. This edition appeared on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction bestseller list for two weeks, covering the period from June 18 to July 1, 2006. It continued to sell well, and by February 2007 there were 55,000 copies in print. A trade paperback edition was published in the United Kingdom by Random House
under the Jonathan Cape
imprint on September 14, 2006; Houghton Mifflin published a paperback edition under the Mariner Books
imprint on June 5, 2007.
In the summer of 2006, a French translation of Fun Home was serialized in the Paris
newspaper Libération
(which had previously serialized Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
). This translation, by Corinne Julve and Lili Sztajn, was subsequently published by Éditions Denoël on October 26, 2006. In January 2007, Fun Home was an official selection of the Angoulême International Comics Festival
. In the same month, the Anglophone
Studies department of the Université François Rabelais, Tours sponsored an academic conference on Bechdel's work, with presentations in Paris and Tours
. At this conference, papers were presented examining Fun Home from several perspectives: as containing "trajectories" filled with paradox
ical tension; as a text interacting with images as a paratext
; and as a search for meaning using drag
as a metaphor. These papers and others on Bechdel and her work were later published in the peer-reviewed journal GRAAT (Groupe de Recherches Anglo-Américaines de Tours, or Tours Anglo-American Research Group).
An Italian translation was published by Rizzoli in January 2007. In Brazil, Conrad Editora
published a Portuguese translation in 2007. A German translation was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in January 2008. The book has also been translated into Hungarian, Korean, and Polish, and a Chinese translation has been scheduled for publication.
In October 2006, a resident of Marshall, Missouri
attempted to have Fun Home and Craig Thompson
's Blankets
, both graphic novels, removed from the city's public library. Supporters of the books' removal characterized them as "pornography" and expressed concern that they would be read by children. Marshall Public Library Director Amy Crump defended the books as having been well-reviewed in "reputable, professional book review journals," and characterized the removal attempt as a step towards "the slippery slope of censorship
". On October 11, 2006, the library's board appointed a committee to create a materials selection policy, and removed Fun Home and Blankets from circulation until the new policy was approved. The committee "decided not to assign a prejudicial label or segregate [the books] by a prejudicial system", and presented a materials selection policy to the board. On March 14, 2007, the Marshall Public Library Board of Trustees voted to return both Fun Home and Blankets to the library's shelves. Bechdel described the attempted banning as "a great honor", and described the incident as "part of the whole evolution of the graphic-novel form."
In 2008, an instructor at the University of Utah
placed Fun Home on the syllabus of a mid-level English course, "Critical Introduction to English Literary Forms". One student objected to the assignment, and was given an alternate reading in accordance with the university's religious accommodation policy. The student subsequently contacted a local organization called "No More Pornography", which started an online petition calling for the book to be removed from the syllabus. Vincent Pecora, the chair of the university's English department, defended Fun Home and the instructor. The university said that it had no plans to remove the book.
Fun Home has been chosen by Brandeis University
for their 2015 class as its freshman entry novel, amidst much praise and critical acclaim for its memoir style and teachings of what has been considered by others to be explicit content.
Fun Home was positively reviewed in many publications. The Times
of London described Fun Home as "a profound and important book;" Salon.com
called it "a beautiful, assured piece of work;" and The New York Times
ran two separate reviews and a feature on the memoir. In one New York Times review, Sean Wilsey
called Fun Home "a pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics
and memoir) in multiple new directions" and "a comic book for lovers of words". Jill Soloway
, writing in the Los Angeles Times
, praised the work overall but commented that Bechdel's reference-heavy prose is at times "a little opaque". Conversely, a reviewer in The Tyee
felt that "the narrator's insistence on linking her story to those of various Greek myths
, American novels
and classic plays
" was "forced" and "heavy-handed". By contrast, the Seattle Times reviewer wrote positively of the book's use of literary reference, calling it "staggeringly literate". The Village Voice
said that Fun Home "shows how powerfully—and economically—the medium can portray autobiographical narrative. With two-part visual and verbal narration that isn't simply synchronous, comics presents a distinctive narrative idiom in which a wealth of information may be expressed in a highly condensed fashion."
Several publications listed Fun Home as one of the best books of 2006, including The New York Times
, Amazon.com
, The Times
of London, New York
magazine and Publishers Weekly
, which ranked it as the best comic book of 2006. Salon.com
named Fun Home the best nonfiction debut of 2006, admitting that they were fudging the definition of "debut" and saying, "Fun Home shimmers with regret, compassion, annoyance, frustration, pity and love—usually all at the same time and never without a pervasive, deeply literary irony about the near-impossible task of staying true to yourself, and to the people who made you who you are." Entertainment Weekly
called it the best nonfiction book of the year, and Time
named Fun Home the best book of 2006, describing it as "the unlikeliest literary success of 2006" and "a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other."
Fun Home was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award
, in the memoir/autobiography category. In 2007, Fun Home won the GLAAD Media Award
for Outstanding Comic Book, the Stonewall Book Award
for non-fiction, the Publishing Triangle-Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award, and the Lambda Literary Award
in the "Lesbian Memoir and Biography" category. Fun Home was nominated for the 2007 Eisner Award
s in two categories, Best Reality-Based Work and Best Graphic Album, and Bechdel was nominated as Best Writer/Artist. Fun Home won the Eisner for Best Reality-Based Work. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly placed Fun Home at #68 in its list of "New Classics" (defined as "the 100 best books from 1983 to 2008"). The Guardian
included Fun Home in its series "1000 novels everyone must read", noting its "beautifully rendered" details.
In 2009, Fun Home was listed as one of the best books of the previous decade by The Times of London, Entertainment Weekly and Salon.com, and as one of the best comic books of the decade by The Onion
s A.V. Club
.
In 2010, the Los Angeles Times
literary blog "Jacket Copy" named Fun Home as one of "20 classic works of gay literature".
Graphic novel
A graphic novel is a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art in either an experimental design or in a traditional comics format...
memoir
Memoir
A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...
by American writer Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel is an American cartoonist. Originally best known for the long-running comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, in 2006 she became a best-selling and critically acclaimed author with her graphic memoir Fun Home.-Early life:...
, author of the comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
Dykes to Watch Out For
Dykes to Watch out For
Dykes to Watch Out For was a comic strip by Alison Bechdel. The strip, which ran from 1983 to 2008, was one of the earliest ongoing representations of lesbians in popular culture and has been called "as important to new generations of lesbians as landmark novels like Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit...
. It chronicles the author's childhood and youth in rural Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
, USA, focusing on her complex relationship with her father. The book addresses themes of sexual orientation
Sexual orientation
Sexual orientation describes a pattern of emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to the opposite sex, the same sex, both, or neither, and the genders that accompany them. By the convention of organized researchers, these attractions are subsumed under heterosexuality, homosexuality,...
, gender role
Gender role
Gender roles refer to the set of social and behavioral norms that are considered to be socially appropriate for individuals of a specific sex in the context of a specific culture, which differ widely between cultures and over time...
s, suicide
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
, dysfunctional family
Dysfunctional family
A dysfunctional family is a family in which conflict, misbehavior, and often abuse on the part of individual members occur continually and regularly, leading other members to accommodate such actions. Children sometimes grow up in such families with the understanding that such an arrangement is...
life, and the role of literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
in understanding oneself and one's family. Writing and illustrating Fun Home took seven years, in part because of Bechdel's laborious artistic process, which includes photographing herself in poses for each human figure.
Fun Home has been both a popular and critical success, and spent two weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list
New York Times Best Seller list
The New York Times Best Seller list is widely considered the preeminent list of best-selling books in the United States. It is published weekly in The New York Times Book Review magazine, which is published in the Sunday edition of The New York Times and as a stand-alone publication...
. In The New York Times Sunday Book Review
The New York Times Book Review
The New York Times Book Review is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely read book review publications in the industry. The offices are located near Times Square in New York...
, Sean Wilsey
Sean Wilsey
Sean Wilsey is the author of the memoir Oh the Glory of It All, which was published by Penguin in 2005. He is the son of Al Wilsey, a San Francisco businessman, and Pat Montandon, a socialite and peace activist, and the stepson of socialite and philanthropist Dede Wilsey...
called it "a pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics
Comics
Comics denotes a hybrid medium having verbal side of its vocabulary tightly tied to its visual side in order to convey narrative or information only, the latter in case of non-fiction comics, seeking synergy by using both visual and verbal side in...
and memoir) in multiple new directions." Several publications named Fun Home as one of the best books of 2006; it was also included in several lists of the best books of the 2000s. It was nominated for several awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award
National Book Critics Circle Award
The National Book Critics Circle Award is an annual award given by the National Book Critics Circle to promote the finest books and reviews published in English....
and three Eisner Award
Eisner Award
The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, commonly shortened to the Eisner Awards, and sometimes referred to as the Oscar Awards of the Comics Industry, are prizes given for creative achievement in American comic books. The Eisner Awards were first conferred in 1988, created in response to the...
s (one of which it won). A French translation of Fun Home was serialized in the newspaper Libération
Libération
Libération is a French daily newspaper founded in Paris by Jean-Paul Sartre and Serge July in 1973 in the wake of the protest movements of May 1968. Originally a leftist newspaper, it has undergone a number of shifts during the 1980s and 1990s...
; the book was an official selection of the Angoulême International Comics Festival
Angoulême International Comics Festival
The Angoulême International Comics Festival is the largest comics festival in Europe. It has occurred every year since 1974 in Angoulême, France, in the month of January.The four-day festival is notable for awarding several prestigious prizes in cartooning...
and has been the subject of an academic conference in France. Fun Home has been the subject of numerous academic publications in areas such as biography studies and cultural studies
Cultural studies
Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary criticism. It generally concerns the political nature of contemporary culture, as well as its historical foundations, conflicts, and defining traits. It is, to this extent, largely distinguished from cultural...
, as part of a larger turn towards serious academic investment in the study of comics
Comics
Comics denotes a hybrid medium having verbal side of its vocabulary tightly tied to its visual side in order to convey narrative or information only, the latter in case of non-fiction comics, seeking synergy by using both visual and verbal side in...
/sequential art
Sequential art
Sequential art refers to the art form of using a train of images deployed in sequence to graphic storytelling or convey information. The best-known example of sequential art is comics, which are a printed arrangement of art and balloons, especially comic books and comic strips.The term is rarely...
.
Fun Home also generated controversy: a public library in Missouri
Missouri
Missouri is a US state located in the Midwestern United States, bordered by Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. With a 2010 population of 5,988,927, Missouri is the 18th most populous state in the nation and the fifth most populous in the Midwest. It...
removed Fun Home from its shelves for five months after local residents objected to its contents.
Plot and thematic summary
Nonlinear (arts)
Nonlinear narrative, disjointed narrative or disrupted narrative is a narrative technique, sometimes used in literature, film, hypertext websites and other narratives, wherein events are portrayed out of chronological order...
and recursive. Incidents are told and re-told in the light of new information or themes. Bechdel describes the structure of Fun Home as a labyrinth
Labyrinth
In Greek mythology, the Labyrinth was an elaborate structure designed and built by the legendary artificer Daedalus for King Minos of Crete at Knossos...
, "going over the same material, but starting from the outside and spiraling in to the center of the story." In an essay on memoirs and truth in the academic journal
Academic journal
An academic journal is a peer-reviewed periodical in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as forums for the introduction and presentation for scrutiny of new research, and the critique of existing research...
PMLA
Modern Language Association
The Modern Language Association of America is the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature...
, Nancy K. Miller
Nancy K. Miller
Nancy K. Miller is an American literary scholar and memoirist.Currently a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, Miller is the author of several books on feminist criticism, women’s writing, and most recently, family memoir, biography, and...
explains that as Bechdel revisits scenes and themes "she re-creates memories in which the force of attachment generates the structure of the memoir itself." Additionally, the memoir derives its structure from allusion
Allusion
An allusion is a figure of speech that makes a reference to, or representation of, people, places, events, literary work, myths, or works of art, either directly or by implication. M. H...
s to various works of literature, Greek myth
Greek mythology
Greek mythology is the body of myths and legends belonging to the ancient Greeks, concerning their gods and heroes, the nature of the world, and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices. They were a part of religion in ancient Greece...
and visual arts
Visual arts
The visual arts are art forms that create works which are primarily visual in nature, such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, and often modern visual arts and architecture...
; the events of Bechdel's family life during her childhood and adolescence are presented through this allusive lens. Miller notes that the narratives of the referenced literary texts "provide clues, both true and false, to the mysteries of family relations."
The memoir focuses on Bechdel's family, and is centered around her relationship with her father, Bruce. Bruce Bechdel was a funeral director
Funeral director
A funeral director , also known as a mortician or undertaker, is a professional involved in the business of funeral rites. These tasks often entail the embalming and burial or cremation of the dead, as well as the planning and arrangement of the actual funeral ceremony...
and high school English
English studies
English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language , English linguistics English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language (including literatures from the U.K., U.S.,...
teacher in Beech Creek
Beech Creek, Pennsylvania
Beech Creek is a borough in Clinton County, Pennsylvania, United States. The population was 717 at the 2000 census. It is the setting for Fun Home, a 2006 graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel, who grew up there...
, where Alison and her siblings grew up. The book's title comes from the family nickname for the funeral home
Funeral home
A funeral home, funeral parlor or mortuary, is a business that provides burial and funeral services for the deceased and their families. These services may include aprepared wake and funeral, and the provision of a chapel for the funeral....
, the family business in which Bruce Bechdel grew up and later worked; the phrase also refers ironically to Bruce Bechdel's tyrannical domestic rule. Bruce Bechdel's two occupations are reflected in Fun Homes focus on death and literature.
In the beginning of the book, the memoir exhibits Bruce Bechdel's obsession with restoring the family's Victorian
Victorian architecture
The term Victorian architecture refers collectively to several architectural styles employed predominantly during the middle and late 19th century. The period that it indicates may slightly overlap the actual reign, 20 June 1837 – 22 January 1901, of Queen Victoria. This represents the British and...
home. His obsessive need to restore the house is connected to his emotional distance from his family, which he expressed in coldness and occasional bouts of abusive rage. This emotional distance, in turn, is connected with his closeted
The Closet
The Closet may refer to:* The Closet , Chinese film* The Closet , French film* The closet, referring to undisclosed homosexuality- See also :* Closet* Closet * In the closet...
homosexual
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...
tendencies. Bruce Bechdel had homosexual relationships in the military and with his high school students; some of those students were also family friends and babysitters. At the age of 44, two weeks after his wife requested a divorce, he stepped into the path of an oncoming Sunbeam Bread
Sunbeam Bread
Sunbeam Bread is a franchised brand of white bread, rolls, and other baked goods owned by the Quality Bakers of America cooperative. The bread products are produced and distributed by eight regional bakeries located in Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Maryland, Missouri, Pennsylvania,...
truck and was killed. Although the evidence is equivocal, Alison Bechdel concludes that her father committed suicide
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
.
The story also deals with Alison Bechdel's own struggle with her sexual identity, reaching a catharsis in the realization that she is a lesbian
Lesbian
Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...
and her coming out
Coming out
Coming out is a figure of speech for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people's disclosure of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity....
to her parents. The memoir frankly examines her sexual development, including transcripts from her childhood diary
Diary
A diary is a record with discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. A personal diary may include a person's experiences, and/or thoughts or feelings, including comment on current events outside the writer's direct experience. Someone...
, anecdotes about masturbation
Masturbation
Masturbation refers to sexual stimulation of a person's own genitals, usually to the point of orgasm. The stimulation can be performed manually, by use of objects or tools, or by some combination of these methods. Masturbation is a common form of autoeroticism...
, and tales of her first sexual experiences with her girlfriend, Joan. In addition to their common homosexuality, Alison and Bruce Bechdel share obsessive-compulsive tendencies and artistic leanings, albeit with opposing aesthetic senses: "I was Sparta
Sparta
Sparta or Lacedaemon, was a prominent city-state in ancient Greece, situated on the banks of the River Eurotas in Laconia, in south-eastern Peloponnese. It emerged as a political entity around the 10th century BC, when the invading Dorians subjugated the local, non-Dorian population. From c...
n to my father's Athenian. Modern
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
to his Victorian. Butch
Butch and femme
Butch and femme are LGBT terms describing respectively, masculine and feminine traits, behavior, style, expression, self-perception and so on. They are often used in the lesbian, bisexual and gay subcultures...
to his nelly. Utilitarian
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is an ethical theory holding that the proper course of action is the one that maximizes the overall "happiness", by whatever means necessary. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined only by its resulting outcome, and that one can...
to his aesthete
Aestheticism
Aestheticism was a 19th century European art movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design...
." This opposition was a source of tension in their relationship, as both tried to express their dissatisfaction with their given gender role
Gender role
Gender roles refer to the set of social and behavioral norms that are considered to be socially appropriate for individuals of a specific sex in the context of a specific culture, which differ widely between cultures and over time...
s: "Not only were we inverts
Sexual inversion (sexology)
Sexual inversion is a term used by sexologists, primarily in the late 19th and early 20th century, to refer to homosexuality. Sexual inversion was believed to be an inborn reversal of gender traits: male inverts were, to a greater or lesser degree, inclined to traditionally female pursuits and...
, we were inversions of each other. While I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him, he was attempting to express something feminine through me. It was a war of cross-purposes, and so doomed to perpetual escalation." However, shortly before Bruce Bechdel's death, he and his daughter have a conversation in which Bruce confesses some of his sexual history; this is presented as a partial resolution to the conflict between father and daughter.
At several points in the book, Bechdel questions whether her decision to come out as a lesbian was one of the triggers for her father's suicide. This question is never answered definitively, but Bechdel closely examines the connection between her father's closeted sexuality and her own open lesbianism, revealing her debt to her father in both positive and negative lights.
Themes
Fun Home had several themes recurring throughout the book. The biggest theme, arguably, is sexual orientation. Bechdel tells the readers of her journey of discovering her own sexuality through books. "My realization at nineteen that I was a lesbian came about in a manner consistent with my bookish upbringing."" Her exposure (from reading literal definitions in dictionaries, reading interviews of others like her, etc.) helped her come to terms with her sexuality, but in truth, the hints of it plagued her childhood: her desire "for the right to exchange [her] tank suit for a pair of shorts" in Cannes" or her desire for her brothers to call her Albert instead of Alison on one camping trip ". However, Bechdel also reveals that she wasn't alone in her choice of partners; her father also exhibited some homosexual behaviors, but in a different way than Alison. "I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy" quoted on page 58 when her mother reveals Bechdel's father's secret. Though both, father and daughter, had similar situations (Bechdel was a lesbian while her father was gay or bisexual), the two handled their issues differently. Bechdel chose to accept the fact and not hide from the issue, taking a female partner and going to "gay union" meetings. Bechdel was open about her sexuality before she'd even been in a same-sex relationship (of any sort). Her father, on the other hand, had had countless affairs with men but wasn't open about it ". This may be due to homophobia (his and/or others'), or because he was married with a family. In any case, it's clear that he's afraid of coming out, as illustrated by "the fear in his eyes" when the conversation topic is dangerously close to homosexuality ".In addition to sexual orientation, the memoir touches on the theme of gender identity. Bechdel had viewed her father as "a big sissy"" while her father constantly tried to change his daughter into a more feminine person throughout her childhood. Through the exhibition of various feminine behaviors of Bechdel's father and various masculine behaviors of Bechdel, we see how the two are opposite of each other, opposite of each of their sex's roles, yet the same in their opposition.
The third, underlying theme of death is also portrayed. Though there is debate as to whether Bechdel's father's death was an accident or suicide, she thinks it much more likely that he killed himself ". Whether this was because of his own sexuality or Bechdel's (or some other cause) remains unclear.
Allusions
The allusive references used in Fun Home are not merely structural or stylistic: Bechdel writes, "I employ these allusions ... not only as descriptive devices, but because my parents are most real to me in fictional terms. And perhaps my cool aesthetic distance itself does more to convey the Arctic climate of our family than any particular literary comparison." Bechdel, as the narrator, considers her relationship to her father through the myth of DaedalusDaedalus
In Greek mythology, Daedalus was a skillful craftsman and artisan.-Family:...
and Icarus
Icarus
-Space and astronomy:* Icarus , on the Moon* Icarus , a planetary science journal* 1566 Icarus, an asteroid* IKAROS, a interplanetary unmanned spacecraft...
. As a child, she confused her family and their Gothic Revival
Gothic Revival architecture
The Gothic Revival is an architectural movement that began in the 1740s in England...
home with the Addams Family
The Addams Family
The Addams Family is a group of fictional characters created by American cartoonist Charles Addams. As named by Charles Addams, the Addams Family characters include Gomez, Morticia, Uncle Fester, Lurch, Grandmama, Wednesday, Pugsley, and Thing....
seen in the cartoons of Charles Addams
Charles Addams
Charles "Chas" Samuel Addams was an American cartoonist known for his particularly black humor and macabre characters...
. Bruce Bechdel's suicide is discussed with reference to Albert Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
' novel A Happy Death
A Happy Death
A Happy Death was the first novel by French writer-philosopher Albert Camus. The existentialist topic of the book is the "will to happiness," the conscious creation of one's happiness, and the need of time to do so...
and essay The Myth of Sisyphus
The Myth of Sisyphus
The Myth of Sisyphus is a philosophical essay by Albert Camus. It comprises about 120 pages and was published originally in 1942 in French as Le Mythe de Sisyphe; the English translation by Justin O'Brien followed in 1955....
. His careful construction of an aesthetic and intellectual world is compared to The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published in1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City from spring to autumn of 1922....
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...
, and the narrator suggests that Bruce Bechdel modeled elements of his life after Fitzgerald's, as portrayed in the biography The Far Side of Paradise
The Far Side of Paradise
The Far Side of Paradise is a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald by Arthur Mizener. It was the first biography about Fitzgerald to be published and is credited with renewing public interest in the subject...
. His wife Helen is compared with the protagonists of the Henry James
Henry James
Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....
novels Washington Square
Washington Square (novel)
Washington Square is a short novel by Henry James. Originally published in 1880 as a serial in Cornhill Magazine and Harper's New Monthly Magazine, it is a structurally simple tragicomedy that recounts the conflict between a dull but sweet daughter and her brilliant, domineering father...
and The Portrait of a Lady
The Portrait of a Lady
The Portrait of a Lady is a novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly and Macmillan's Magazine in 1880–81 and then as a book in 1881...
. Helen Bechdel was an amateur actress, and plays in which she acted are also used to illuminate aspects of her marriage. She met Bruce Bechdel when the two were appearing in a college production of The Taming of the Shrew
The Taming of the Shrew
The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1590 and 1591.The play begins with a framing device, often referred to as the Induction, in which a mischievous nobleman tricks a drunken tinker named Sly into believing he is actually a nobleman himself...
, and Alison Bechdel intimates that this was "a harbinger of my parents' later marriage". Helen Bechdel's role as Lady Bracknell in a local production of The Importance of Being Earnest
The Importance of Being Earnest
The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People is a play by Oscar Wilde. First performed on 14 February 1895 at St. James's Theatre in London, it is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personae in order to escape burdensome social obligations...
is shown in some detail; Bruce Bechdel is compared with Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
. His homosexuality is also examined with allusion to Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
's In Search of Lost Time
In Search of Lost Time
In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past is a novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust. His most prominent work, it is popularly known for its considerable length and the notion of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the "episode of the madeleine." The novel is widely...
. The father and daughter's artistic and obsessive-compulsive tendencies are discussed with reference to E. H. Shepard
E. H. Shepard
Ernest Howard Shepard was an English artist and book illustrator. He was known especially for his human-like animals in illustrations for The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame and Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne....
's illustrations for The Wind in the Willows
The Wind in the Willows
The Wind in the Willows is a classic of children's literature by Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Alternately slow moving and fast paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animal characters in a pastoral version of England...
. Bruce and Alison Bechdel exchange hints about their sexualities by exchanging memoirs: the father gives the daughter Earthly Paradise, an autobiographical collection of the writings of Colette
Colette
Colette was the surname of the French novelist and performer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette . She is best known for her novel Gigi, upon which Lerner and Loewe based the stage and film musical comedies of the same title.-Early life and marriage:Colette was born to retired military officer Jules-Joseph...
; shortly afterwards, in what Alison Bechdel describes as "an eloquent unconscious gesture", she leaves a library copy of Kate Millett
Kate Millett
Kate Millett is an American lesbian feminist writer and activist. A seminal influence on second-wave feminism, Millet is best known for her 1970 book Sexual Politics.-Career:...
's memoir Flying for him. Finally, returning to the Daedalus myth, Alison Bechdel casts herself as Stephen Dedalus
Stephen Dedalus
Stephen Dedalus is James Joyce's literary alter ego, appearing as the protagonist and antihero of his first, semi-autobiographical novel of artistic existence A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and an important character in Joyce's Ulysses...
and her father as Leopold Bloom
Leopold Bloom
Leopold Bloom is the fictional protagonist and hero of James Joyce's Ulysses. His peregrinations and encounters in Dublin on 16 June 1904 mirror, on a more mundane and intimate scale, those of Ulysses/Odysseus in The Odyssey....
in James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
's Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...
, with parallel references to the myth of Telemachus
Telemachus
Telemachus is a figure in Greek mythology, the son of Odysseus and Penelope, and a central character in Homer's Odyssey. The first four books in particular focus on Telemachus' journeys in search of news about his father, who has been away at war...
and Odysseus
Odysseus
Odysseus or Ulysses was a legendary Greek king of Ithaca and the hero of Homer's epic poem the Odyssey. Odysseus also plays a key role in Homer's Iliad and other works in the Epic Cycle....
.
In addition to the literary allusions which are explicitly acknowledged in the text, Bechdel incorporates visual allusions to television programs and other items of pop culture into her artwork, often as images on a television in the background of a panel. These visual references include the film It's a Wonderful Life
It's a Wonderful Life
It's a Wonderful Life is a 1946 American Christmas drama film produced and directed by Frank Capra and based on the short story "The Greatest Gift" written by Philip Van Doren Stern....
, Bert and Ernie
Bert and Ernie
Bert and Ernie are two muppets on the popular U.S. children's television show Sesame Street. The two appear together in numerous skits, forming a comic duo that is one of the centerpieces of the program. Originated by Frank Oz and Jim Henson, the characters are currently performed by Muppeteers...
of Sesame Street
Sesame Street
Sesame Street has undergone significant changes in its history. According to writer Michael Davis, by the mid-1970s the show had become "an American institution". The cast and crew expanded during this time, including the hiring of women in the crew and additional minorities in the cast. The...
, the Smiley Face, Yogi Bear
Yogi Bear
Yogi Bear is a fictional bear who appears in animated cartoons created by Hanna-Barbera Productions. He made his debut in 1958 as a supporting character in The Huckleberry Hound Show. Yogi Bear was the first breakout character created by Hanna-Barbera, and was eventually more popular than...
, Batman
Batman (TV series)
Batman is an American television series, based on the DC comic book character of the same name. It stars Adam West as Batman and Burt Ward as Robin — two crime-fighting heroes who defend Gotham City. It aired on the American Broadcasting Company network for three seasons from January 12, 1966 to...
, the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote
Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner
Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner are a duo of cartoon characters from a series of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. The characters were created by animation director Chuck Jones in 1948 for Warner Bros., while the template for their adventures was the work of writer Michael Maltese...
, the resignation of Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...
and The Flying Nun
The Flying Nun
The Flying Nun is an American sitcom produced by Screen Gems for ABC based on the 1965 book The Fifteenth Pelican, by Tere Rios, which starred Sally Field as Sister Bertrille...
.
Main characters
Alison Bechdel (NarratorNarrator
A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...
and Author): In the book, Alison shows the reader different times in her and her father's life ; she does this starting from her and her father playing when she was just a little girl all the way to her adulthood. During the story, she talks about her strangled relationship with her father and her confusion as to why she believes that he killed himself. In the book, she also shows flashes of her personality, like her case of OCD. An important scene in the book is when she comes out to her parents. This is an emotional point in her life because she realizes she's doing the exact opposite of what her father had done.
Bruce Bechdel: Bruce is the father of Alison and her two brothers and was married to his wife Helen. While the book is based on Alison's life, it is emotionally centered on her father. During the book, Alison talks about her relationship with her father and what she believed were the physical causes and the underlying thoughts in her father's head before his death. In the book, it talks about how he had been having affairs with men ever since he was in the military. He was a closet homosexual and had never openly admitted to it to his family, causing much emotional strife. He was an English teacher, an actor, and a Funeral Director at Beech Creek. Throughout the book, it shows how he loved the book The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published in1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City from spring to autumn of 1922....
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...
and admires and strives to be like the main character in the book, Jay Gatsby. This was symbolic because at many points of the memoir Alison would come up with stunningly similar comparisons between the two men's lives. He would be seen doing work on the family's home to bring it back to the state that it once was. Two weeks after he has his divorce with his ex-wife, he is hit by a truck by the side of the road. Everyone but his daughter thought it was an accident while she thought it was suicide.
Helen Bechdel: Helen is the wife of Bruce and the mother of Alison. She appears throughout the book, sometimes giving Alison guidance. She is an actor, a writer, and an English teacher. In the book, she was shocked to find out that her daughter was gay and even grow upset over it. In the book her discontent with her uneventful life was shown in her progression through life through Alison's speculations.
Minor Characters
Joan: Joan was Alison's first girlfriend. Alison meets her in college while experimenting with her sexuality. She was Alison's first experience.Roy: Roy was one of Bruce's "friends" that would come over to help him around the house. Roy was really one of the affairs that Bruce had. He was also the babysitter.
Artwork
Fun Home is drawn in black line artLine art
Line art is any image that consists of distinct straight and curved lines placed against a background, without gradations in shade or hue to represent two-dimensional or three-dimensional objects...
with a gray-green ink wash
Wash (painting)
thumb|Example of a wash drawing by [[R. G. Skerrett]].A wash is a painting technique in which a paint brush that is very wet with solvent and holds a small paint load is applied to a wet or dry support such as paper or primed or raw canvas. The result is a smooth and uniform area that ideally lacks...
. Sean Wilsey wrote that Fun Homes panels "combine the detail and technical proficiency of R. Crumb
Robert Crumb
Robert Dennis Crumb —known as Robert Crumb and R. Crumb—is an American artist, illustrator, and musician recognized for the distinctive style of his drawings and his critical, satirical, subversive view of the American mainstream.Crumb was a founder of the underground comix movement and is regarded...
with a seriousness, emotional complexity and innovation completely its own." Writing in the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Diane Ellen Hamer contrasted "Bechdel's habit of drawing her characters very simply and yet distinctly" with "the attention to detail that she devotes to the background, those TV shows and posters on the wall, not to mention the intricacies of the funeral home as a recurring backdrop." Bechdel told an interviewer for The Comics Journal
The Comics Journal
The Comics Journal, often abbreviated TCJ, is an American magazine of news and criticism pertaining to comic books, comic strips and graphic novels...
that the richness of each panel of Fun Home was very deliberate:
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Adobe Systems. Illustrator is similar in scope, intended market, and functionality to its competitors, CorelDraw, Xara Designer Pro and Macromedia FreeHand....
, on which she placed the text and drew rough figures. She used extensive photo reference
Photo-referencing
Photo-referencing in visual art is the practice of creating art based on a photograph. Art produced through this technique is said to be photo-referenced....
and, for many panels, posed for each human figure herself, using a digital camera
Digital camera
A digital camera is a camera that takes video or still photographs, or both, digitally by recording images via an electronic image sensor. It is the main device used in the field of digital photography...
to record her poses. Bechdel also used photo reference for background elements. For example, to illustrate a panel depicting fireworks seen from a Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...
rooftop on July 4, 1976, she used Google Images to find a photograph of the New York skyline taken from that particular building in that period. She also painstakingly copied by hand many family photographs, letters, local maps and excerpts from her own childhood journal, incorporating these images into her narrative. After using the reference material to draw a tight framework for the page, Bechdel copied the line art illustration onto plate finish Bristol board
Bristol board
Bristol board is an uncoated, machine-finished paperboard. It is named after the city of Bristol in the southwest of England...
for the final inked page, which she then scanned into her computer. The gray-green ink wash for each page was drawn on a separate page of watercolor paper, and combined with the inked image using Photoshop. Bechdel chose the greenish wash color for its flexibility, and because it had "a bleak, elegiac quality" which suited the subject matter. Bechdel attributes this detailed creative process to her "barely controlled obsessive-compulsive disorder".
Publication and reception
Fun Home was first printed in hardcover by Houghton MifflinHoughton Mifflin
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is an educational and trade publisher in the United States. Headquartered in Boston's Back Bay, it publishes textbooks, instructional technology materials, assessments, reference works, and fiction and non-fiction for both young readers and adults.-History:The company was...
(Boston, New York
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
) on June 8, 2006. This edition appeared on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction bestseller list for two weeks, covering the period from June 18 to July 1, 2006. It continued to sell well, and by February 2007 there were 55,000 copies in print. A trade paperback edition was published in the United Kingdom by Random House
Random House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...
under the Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...
imprint on September 14, 2006; Houghton Mifflin published a paperback edition under the Mariner Books
Mariner Books
Mariner Books, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was established in 1997 as a publisher of fiction, non fiction, and poetry in paperback. Mariner is also the publisher of the Harvest imprint backlist, formerly published by Harcourt Brace/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.-Publisher bibliography:*The...
imprint on June 5, 2007.
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
newspaper Libération
Libération
Libération is a French daily newspaper founded in Paris by Jean-Paul Sartre and Serge July in 1973 in the wake of the protest movements of May 1968. Originally a leftist newspaper, it has undergone a number of shifts during the 1980s and 1990s...
(which had previously serialized Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Marjane Satrapi
Marjane Satrapi is an Iranian-born French contemporary graphic novelist, illustrator, animated film director, and children's book author...
). This translation, by Corinne Julve and Lili Sztajn, was subsequently published by Éditions Denoël on October 26, 2006. In January 2007, Fun Home was an official selection of the Angoulême International Comics Festival
Angoulême International Comics Festival
The Angoulême International Comics Festival is the largest comics festival in Europe. It has occurred every year since 1974 in Angoulême, France, in the month of January.The four-day festival is notable for awarding several prestigious prizes in cartooning...
. In the same month, the Anglophone
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
Studies department of the Université François Rabelais, Tours sponsored an academic conference on Bechdel's work, with presentations in Paris and Tours
Tours
Tours is a city in central France, the capital of the Indre-et-Loire department.It is located on the lower reaches of the river Loire, between Orléans and the Atlantic coast. Touraine, the region around Tours, is known for its wines, the alleged perfection of its local spoken French, and for the...
. At this conference, papers were presented examining Fun Home from several perspectives: as containing "trajectories" filled with paradox
Paradox
Similar to Circular reasoning, A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition...
ical tension; as a text interacting with images as a paratext
Paratext
Paratext is a concept in literary interpretation. The main text of published authors is often surrounded by other material supplied by editors, printers, and publishers, which is known as the paratext. These added elements form a frame for the main text, and can change the reception of a text or...
; and as a search for meaning using drag
Drag (clothing)
Drag is used for any clothing carrying symbolic significance but usually referring to the clothing associated with one gender role when worn by a person of another gender. The origin of the term "drag" is unknown, but it may have originated in Polari, a gay street argot in England in the early...
as a metaphor. These papers and others on Bechdel and her work were later published in the peer-reviewed journal GRAAT (Groupe de Recherches Anglo-Américaines de Tours, or Tours Anglo-American Research Group).
An Italian translation was published by Rizzoli in January 2007. In Brazil, Conrad Editora
Conrad Editora
Conrad Editora is a book publishing company in Brazil. Generally known as one of the most popular distributors of manga and manhwa in the Brazilian Portuguese language.-Manga:...
published a Portuguese translation in 2007. A German translation was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in January 2008. The book has also been translated into Hungarian, Korean, and Polish, and a Chinese translation has been scheduled for publication.
In October 2006, a resident of Marshall, Missouri
Marshall, Missouri
Marshall is a city in Saline County, Missouri, United States. The population was 13,065 at the 2010 census. It is the county seat of Saline County,. The Marshall Micropolitan Statistical Area consists of Saline County. It is also home to Missouri Valley College...
attempted to have Fun Home and Craig Thompson
Craig Thompson
Craig Matthew Thompson is a graphic novelist best known for his books Good-Bye, Chunky Rice , Blankets , Carnet de Voyage and Habibi . Thompson has received four Harvey Awards, two Eisner Awards, and two Ignatz Awards...
's Blankets
Blankets (graphic novel)
Blankets is an autobiographical graphic novel by Craig Thompson, published in 2003 by Top Shelf Productions. As a coming-of-age autobiography, the book tells the story of Thompson's childhood in an Evangelical Christian family, his first love, and his early adulthood...
, both graphic novels, removed from the city's public library. Supporters of the books' removal characterized them as "pornography" and expressed concern that they would be read by children. Marshall Public Library Director Amy Crump defended the books as having been well-reviewed in "reputable, professional book review journals," and characterized the removal attempt as a step towards "the slippery slope of censorship
Censorship
thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...
". On October 11, 2006, the library's board appointed a committee to create a materials selection policy, and removed Fun Home and Blankets from circulation until the new policy was approved. The committee "decided not to assign a prejudicial label or segregate [the books] by a prejudicial system", and presented a materials selection policy to the board. On March 14, 2007, the Marshall Public Library Board of Trustees voted to return both Fun Home and Blankets to the library's shelves. Bechdel described the attempted banning as "a great honor", and described the incident as "part of the whole evolution of the graphic-novel form."
In 2008, an instructor at the University of Utah
University of Utah
The University of Utah, also known as the U or the U of U, is a public, coeducational research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. The university was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret by the General Assembly of the provisional State of Deseret, making it Utah's oldest...
placed Fun Home on the syllabus of a mid-level English course, "Critical Introduction to English Literary Forms". One student objected to the assignment, and was given an alternate reading in accordance with the university's religious accommodation policy. The student subsequently contacted a local organization called "No More Pornography", which started an online petition calling for the book to be removed from the syllabus. Vincent Pecora, the chair of the university's English department, defended Fun Home and the instructor. The university said that it had no plans to remove the book.
Fun Home has been chosen by Brandeis University
Brandeis University
Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...
for their 2015 class as its freshman entry novel, amidst much praise and critical acclaim for its memoir style and teachings of what has been considered by others to be explicit content.
Reviews and awards
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
of London described Fun Home as "a profound and important book;" Salon.com
Salon.com
Salon.com, part of Salon Media Group , often just called Salon, is an online liberal magazine, with content updated each weekday. Salon was founded by David Talbot and launched on November 20, 1995. It was the internet's first online-only commercial publication. The magazine focuses on U.S...
called it "a beautiful, assured piece of work;" and The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
ran two separate reviews and a feature on the memoir. In one New York Times review, Sean Wilsey
Sean Wilsey
Sean Wilsey is the author of the memoir Oh the Glory of It All, which was published by Penguin in 2005. He is the son of Al Wilsey, a San Francisco businessman, and Pat Montandon, a socialite and peace activist, and the stepson of socialite and philanthropist Dede Wilsey...
called Fun Home "a pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics
Comics
Comics denotes a hybrid medium having verbal side of its vocabulary tightly tied to its visual side in order to convey narrative or information only, the latter in case of non-fiction comics, seeking synergy by using both visual and verbal side in...
and memoir) in multiple new directions" and "a comic book for lovers of words". Jill Soloway
Jill Soloway
Jill Soloway is an American comedian, playwright, a feminist and an Emmy-nominated television writer.Soloway was an executive producer and show-runner of the Showtime show The United States of Tara created by writer Diablo Cody. Soloway exited the show in November 2009...
, writing in the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
, praised the work overall but commented that Bechdel's reference-heavy prose is at times "a little opaque". Conversely, a reviewer in The Tyee
The Tyee
The Tyee is an independent Canadian online web magazine, which focuses on coverage of news and media issues in British Columbia.The Tyee was launched in November 2003 by David Beers, a journalist who had previously been associated with the Vancouver Sun...
felt that "the narrator's insistence on linking her story to those of various Greek myths
Greek mythology
Greek mythology is the body of myths and legends belonging to the ancient Greeks, concerning their gods and heroes, the nature of the world, and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices. They were a part of religion in ancient Greece...
, American novels
American literature
American literature is the written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies. For more specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the United States. During its early history, America was a series of British...
and classic plays
Play (theatre)
A play is a form of literature written by a playwright, usually consisting of scripted dialogue between characters, intended for theatrical performance rather than just reading. There are rare dramatists, notably George Bernard Shaw, who have had little preference whether their plays were performed...
" was "forced" and "heavy-handed". By contrast, the Seattle Times reviewer wrote positively of the book's use of literary reference, calling it "staggeringly literate". The Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...
said that Fun Home "shows how powerfully—and economically—the medium can portray autobiographical narrative. With two-part visual and verbal narration that isn't simply synchronous, comics presents a distinctive narrative idiom in which a wealth of information may be expressed in a highly condensed fashion."
Several publications listed Fun Home as one of the best books of 2006, including The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
, The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
of London, New York
New York (magazine)
New York is a weekly magazine principally concerned with the life, culture, politics, and style of New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to The New Yorker, it was brasher and less polite than that magazine, and established itself as a cradle of New...
magazine and Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...
, which ranked it as the best comic book of 2006. Salon.com
Salon.com
Salon.com, part of Salon Media Group , often just called Salon, is an online liberal magazine, with content updated each weekday. Salon was founded by David Talbot and launched on November 20, 1995. It was the internet's first online-only commercial publication. The magazine focuses on U.S...
named Fun Home the best nonfiction debut of 2006, admitting that they were fudging the definition of "debut" and saying, "Fun Home shimmers with regret, compassion, annoyance, frustration, pity and love—usually all at the same time and never without a pervasive, deeply literary irony about the near-impossible task of staying true to yourself, and to the people who made you who you are." Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
called it the best nonfiction book of the year, and Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
named Fun Home the best book of 2006, describing it as "the unlikeliest literary success of 2006" and "a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other."
Fun Home was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award
National Book Critics Circle Award
The National Book Critics Circle Award is an annual award given by the National Book Critics Circle to promote the finest books and reviews published in English....
, in the memoir/autobiography category. In 2007, Fun Home won the GLAAD Media Award
GLAAD Media Awards
The GLAAD Media Award is an accolade bestowed by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation to recognize and honor various branches of the media for their outstanding representations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and the issues that affect their lives...
for Outstanding Comic Book, the Stonewall Book Award
Stonewall Book Award
Sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table of the American Library Association , the Stonewall Book Award is for LGBT books...
for non-fiction, the Publishing Triangle-Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award, and the Lambda Literary Award
Lambda Literary Award
Lambda Literary Awards are awarded yearly by the US-based Lambda Literary Foundation to published works which celebrate or explore LGBT themes. Categories include Humor, Romance and Biography. To qualify, a book must have been published in the United States in the year current to the award...
in the "Lesbian Memoir and Biography" category. Fun Home was nominated for the 2007 Eisner Award
Eisner Award
The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, commonly shortened to the Eisner Awards, and sometimes referred to as the Oscar Awards of the Comics Industry, are prizes given for creative achievement in American comic books. The Eisner Awards were first conferred in 1988, created in response to the...
s in two categories, Best Reality-Based Work and Best Graphic Album, and Bechdel was nominated as Best Writer/Artist. Fun Home won the Eisner for Best Reality-Based Work. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly placed Fun Home at #68 in its list of "New Classics" (defined as "the 100 best books from 1983 to 2008"). The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
included Fun Home in its series "1000 novels everyone must read", noting its "beautifully rendered" details.
In 2009, Fun Home was listed as one of the best books of the previous decade by The Times of London, Entertainment Weekly and Salon.com, and as one of the best comic books of the decade by The Onion
The Onion
The Onion is an American news satire organization. It is an entertainment newspaper and a website featuring satirical articles reporting on international, national, and local news, in addition to a non-satirical entertainment section known as The A.V. Club...
s A.V. Club
The A.V. Club
The A.V. Club is an entertainment newspaper and website published by The Onion. Its features include reviews of new films, music, television, books, games and DVDs, as well as interviews and other regular offerings examining both new and classic media and other elements of pop culture. Unlike its...
.
In 2010, the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
literary blog "Jacket Copy" named Fun Home as one of "20 classic works of gay literature".
External links
- Houghton Mifflin's Fun Home press release, with excerpts from the book and video of Bechdel's artistic process
- dykestowatchoutfor.com, author Alison Bechdel's blog and official website
- What the Little Old Ladies Feel: How I told my mother about my memoir. SlateSlate (magazine)Slate is a US-based English language online current affairs and culture magazine created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN. On 21 December 2004 it was purchased by the Washington Post Company...
article by Bechdel