Fun Home

Maybe it was Bechdel’s illustration style with the very heavy, angular faces and expressions, but her characters seemed dynamic in a way that Bell’s didn’t (or at least, in a different way). When the narration launches into moments way back in her childhood, it really seems like another time, and not just because Bechdel is a little kid. Her descriptions of the things she notices about her father are part of what help to create the dynamism in her characters. On pg. 95, for example, she is a very little kid watching a country western on T.V. while her dad is in the back of the frame arranging flowers. In frames like this one, words aren’t even needed to understand what is going through her thoughts. A little girl probably would not be able to put her finger on the fact that her father is gay, which of course Bechdel doesn’t do either. But the opposition between the depiction of men on the television screen and what her father is doing in the next room makes it clear that even as a little kid she picked up on something, “sensed a chink in my family’s armor.” Bechdel takes the time to characterize her father as she saw him over the course of her entire growing up. The things the little girl in front of the television noticed and felt do not change but develop into a more concrete understanding. When she goes to New York at fifteen, her father is placed directly into an environment that makes a lot of sense, and not just for him. On pg. 95, in the bottom left frame, they are all seeing a ballet. But the expressions on their two faces (Bechdel and her father) are riveted while her brothers look distracted. In this moment it seems that the perceptions she’s been forming about her father are sinking in on a more personal level. Bechdel’s father is so interesting because of the way she uses what she understands about him to gradually define her own sexuality. Their interactions often consist of one making up for something the other lacks. The barrette argument on pg. 96 is a comical instance, but it illustrates their differences in a way that makes them really come across as similarities. Neither fits the mould they are “supposed” to, each doing what the other supposedly should be: she’s playing basketball while he’s putting her hair in barrettes. What would the father’s life have been like if he had had only sons, and had not had that sort of relationship? If her father had not been gay, how different would her own story have been? In the end, as she makes her final reflections, there is a very powerful image of her father giving her a piggyback in the pool. The heading says, “Perhaps my eagerness to claim him as ‘gay’…is just a way of keeping him to myself…” There was and still is something special between them. What they had in common was their secret, and in many ways that connection doesn’t end with his death. Instead, it seems that a good number of her reflections about who he was happen after he dies; his presence doesn’t diminish even when he’s physically not on the page. Bechdel’s mother never appears to have much in common with anyone, especially not with her daughter. Her devotion to her activities- her thesis, her acting, the housekeeping duties- seemed like a way to distract from the loneliness of being married to someone who can’t be there completely. But there was a sense of loneliness throughout the whole family that didn’t just apply to her mother. In the frame that has each member of the family secluded in their own rooms, isolated from everyone else, it looks like nobody is particularly happy. If her father had something to do with the formation of her own identity, he certainly had a lot to do with the uneasiness that is felt in the parts that depict Bechdel’s early family. But just like Sandell’s story, Bechdel’s relationship with her father is powerful, with a lot of grey areas.