Alison and Her Father

 After finishing Fun Home, I kept thinking back to one particular scene that stuck out to me. On pages 220 and 221, Bechdel draws herself and her father in the car on the way to the movies. This sequence of drawings stands out from the rest of the book because it is made up of twenty-four equally sized squares and it’s the most honest conversation we get between Alison and her father.  

This scene represents the complicated bond Alison had with her father. At the end of this conversation, Alison ponders to herself, “But which of us was the father? I had felt distinctly parental listening to his shamefaced recitation” (221). Alison was able to achieve a sense of identity and acceptance of her sexuality in a way that her father never did. It’s apparent that Alison sometimes feels guilty about coming out to her parents because she wonders if her father committed suicide in reaction to that. In this scene, Alison wants to bond with her father over their shared identity. However, her father has never been open, except for this short interaction in the car. This contrasts the rest of the story in which he represses his inclinations specifically “feminine” ones.  

Another way that Alison and her father connect is through literature. I thought it was interesting that the two became close in this way because in Alison’s adolescence as she had put it “I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture” (14). So, it seemed through academia and literature their relationship became the closest it had ever been. Unfortunately, at the peak of these interactions is when her father passed away.  

As a lens into this father-daughter relationship it’s also relevant to reflect on Alison’s accuracy and reliability as a memoirist, which she is open about in this very text. Specifically, when she refers to her old diary entries, Alison points out how she either modified or omitted events that were happening in her life. It’s interesting how Alison remembers things about her childhood and adolescence and she even addresses the fact that her opinions and perspective on her own past change. For example, the summer of Watergate, Alison’s first period, her mother’s play and her father’s legal debacle can be looked at in hindsight much differently, because a young girl Alison did was not presented with all of the information. She describes the Nixon hearings as “a nuisance to me” (172) and her father’s “legal entanglement seemed like a technicality to me” (175).  

Overall, Bechdel writes about her father through her mature eye. She is able to untangle perspectives and misunderstandings of her family dynamics, but at the same time is transparent about the fact that some of what she writes is probably biased.