Shortly after this time, Alison and her brother Christian were born, and Bruce and Helen purchased the Gothic Revival house.Īs kids, Alison and her brothers had to do chores in the funeral home, which they nicknamed the “Fun Home.” As the nickname implies, their interaction with the Fun Home gave them a desensitized and often “cavalier” attitude towards death.
Upon their return to the U.S., Bruce inherited the Bechdel family-run funeral home.
Eventually Helen moved to Europe to marry Bruce, but their time there was short-lived, as the couple had to return home to Beech Creek after the death of Bruce’s father. There, he courted Helen by exchanging letters with her. Alison notes that when Bruce was in the army during World War II he got stationed in Europe. Alison gives a brief biography of her father, noting that he was born, lived, died, and was buried all within a two-mile radius in the town of Beech Creek, Pennsylvania. Alison then reveals that Bruce killed himself while she was in college, and though he lived through most of her childhood, she and the rest of the family felt his absence long before he was physically gone.Īlison then delves into the details surrounding Bruce’s death-though there’s no concrete proof that he killed himself, the circumstances preceding the incident (like Alison coming out as a lesbian a few months earlier as well as Helen, Alison’s mother, filing for a divorce just two weeks before his death) make Alison relatively certain his death was a suicide. Alison details Bruce’s obsession with restoring the family’s old Gothic Revival house, which Alison believes was largely motivated by his desire to keep up the appearance of being a good Christian family man even as he was also secretly sleeping with some of his male teenage students. The memoir starts with Alison as a young girl, playing with her father, who she compares to both Daedalus, the genius inventor of Greek myth, and Icarus, Daedulus’s son who flew too close to the sun on wings designed by his father and plummeted to his death.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel tracing her journey from young girl to young adult as she comes to grips with her own lesbian sexuality, her father Bruce’s (most likely) suicide, and his secret homosexuality or bisexuality that he kept hidden throughout his life while having affairs with underage boys.
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