A Biography of Books

As much as Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is an autobiography that details above all else the impact of her relationship with her father, it is also very much a biography of her relationship with books—whether of mythology, classic literature, or drama—and the way in which they symbolized her family dynamic and influenced her personal identity development.

Bechdel grew up in a small town, or hamlet, as she describes it, in which her father had purchased and was restoring an old mansion; this work, although not his full time job, “was his passion….in every sense of the word” (7).   But her father’s personality and tendencies—which ranged from abusive to passive to illegal—went far beyond an obsession with restoring an old house and had a deep influence on Bechdel’s adolescence. 

As she describes her home life, her childhood, her college years, and her discovery of her sexual identity, she uses references to authors, mythological creatures, and characters in plays to describe her father’s behavior, her parent’s relationship, and her own relationship to her father, her mother, and her home.  She talks of mythical legends—Icarus, Daedalus, Sisyphus—even in their literary incarnations, and of authors.  In the case of Sisyphus, of course, she refers to Albert Camus and The Myth of Sisyphus, but she talks also of F. Scott Fitzergerald and The Great Gatsby, Proust, and others.  She refers to plays—The Taming of the Shrew and others in which her mother performs.    

While all of these works have thematic elements that were significant to Bechdel’s life—punishment, death, memory, identity, coming-of-age, this, to me, was not the most striking symbolism. In the first several chapters, all of Bechdel’s references are to works of fiction; this conveys that she remembers her childhood with detachment from reality.  She notes, for example, her father’s external appearance as “an ideal husband and father” (17), despite the strict, nearly obsessive standards to which he held his family at home.  In a sense, Bechdel seemed to feel as though she were growing up in her father’s own story, a story in which both he and her mother were most comfortable in roles outside of their reality.

It becomes particularly interesting, then, to note the paths Bechdel travelled to come into her own identity, particularly her sexual identity.  This process still takes place through the medium of writing—she reads numerous books about homosexuality (she also reads some about obsessive compulsive disorder).  However, whereas her childhood was surrounded by illusion, and perceived versions of reality, her later life is portrayed as much more real, and even, in some ways, a bit scientific.  Beyond the works related to feminism and lesbianism, many of Bechdel’s ‘identity epiphanies’ resulted from consultations to the dictionary, a book of pure definition.  The dictionary is Spartan in comparison to literature; Bechdel decided early on in life that she would live sparsely, in comparison to her father’s luxurious Athenian tendencies.  While this does allude to the times of mythology previously referenced, it reflects her deep-seated reactions to her upbringing.

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In the last chapter of Fun Home, the father-daughter relationship does seem to improve; it is ironic, however, that the one moment in which Alison and Bruce Bechdel really seem to connect, on the same level—in the car, on the way to the movies—the author experiences a sort of role reversal, an event I look forward to exploring further in reading and discussion.