I have wanted to read Fun Home for a very long time, and now I finally got to. When I originally tried, my undergrad library didn’t have it in, so I read the sequel, Are You My Mother?, instead. I first learned about it when we read a few pages for a Rhetoric of the Body class I took sophomore year. I don’t remember the content of the excerpt, but almost the entire book felt familiar to me as I read. Maybe because so much of Are You My Mother? includes discussions and visuals of the writing process of Fun Home?
I noticed how in this book, too, like Trans: A Memoir, the texts that the author was reading and encountering and thinking about, both in relation to their identity and not, are absolutely integral to the book. Bechdel does not explicitly discuss all, or even most, of them, but she includes them by sketching in the titles on stacks of books in the panels. Some I recognize (like Orlando ), others I have heard of (Earthly Paradise by Colette), and others I haven’t. Like with the books mentioned in Trans: A Memoir, I’m adding some of them to my list. It also made me decide I need to add Mark’s book, Queer Literacies, to my orals list as secondary source material. All three of the memoirs I’ve read so far are wrapped up in their authors reading. Fitzgerald, Joyce, and whatever the lesbian section of the library looked like in the 1980s swirl through the book.
When I started reading, my partner asked me, “Isn’t there some criticism that she doesn’t hold her father accountable enough for being a pedophile?” I didn’t know, so I paid attention to moments of accountability as I read. There are multiple times she writes about struggling to feel angry with her father, or even feeling much at all, despite that it is easy for her to list his flaws as a person and parent. Yet while she doesn’t directly write about the issue of her father preying on teenage boys very often, Bechdel’s grappling with the issue is evident in the art. Even when the main thrust of the narrative is about something else, she draws moments when in retrospect something untoward might have been happening in front of her eyes, even when as a child, she did not know it. Certainly the verbal and physical abuse is only alluded to in the text, but is made very, very clear in the pictures.
Because the book is less than 15 years old, and I first learned about it even more recently, I have to repeatedly remind myself that Alison is close to my parents’ age—slightly older, actually— and her parents more like my grandparents. Her reflections on her childhood and what was likely happening without her knowledge are not only revising the story of her life after receiving new information, but reflecting from an even greater distance on those initial weeks. How much of the subtle “background” details of the panels depicting her childhood did she insert into her mental story during her twenties, and how much was only added as she was drawing the book?
Part of the difficulty and beauty of Fun Home is the coexistence of both deep pain and deep love Bechdel has in relation to her father. She describes her family as “arctic” in climate, yet still they were a family, and there are multiple moments of profound intimacy between her and her dad in the book despite their simultaneous alienation from each other.
When writing about her childhood visit to NYC in the late 1960s, Bechdel marvels at the trip as a strange interlude between her parents’ young adulthood in Manhattan a decade earlier, and her own young adulthood in Manhattan a decade later. They visited only weeks after Stonewall, although she did not know it at the time. She wishes her dad had been able to live in a more progressive area, and maybe he would have been more at peace and less predatory, yet knows that if he had, she might not even exist. On the same trip, Bechdel’s little brother goes missing and a man tries to pick him up at the piers. Their dad panics more than he might have, because he knows, but he’s also less angry than he would characteristically be, because he knows.
Although Bechdel’s dad and my dad have very little in common, I couldn’t help but feel some feelings anyway. The dream sequence where Bechdel tries to show her dad a beautiful sunset but he reaches the top of the hill too late really hit me, as did their conversation about her dad’s history with men in the car. I came out to my dad while we were driving in a car. There are other moments that sparked my own memories for me, but they’re even less obviously related and hard to put into words. At first, it seems silly to me to identify with moments in Fun Home that really aren’t very much like my life at all, or only in surface ways; Alison’s coming out process was nothing like my own, my conversation in the car with my dad was nothing like hers. We were just both in the car with our dads. Our families and family dynamics have very little in common. Yet that says something, I think— that I was personally moved anyway, and moved to think about things that haven’t really been on my mind in months.
I think it says something about the isolation and yearning for stories like our own that so many LGBTQ+ people experience, even when we think of ourselves as having a community. I don’t think of myself as feeling particularly isolated in this sense, but I guess I must, because I felt kinship and understanding with Alison and treasured that feeling, even as she was finding kinship with Colette and the other queer women she read about.
When reading the parts on Bechdel’s move to NYC and her hopes for finding a lesbian community, and her own reflections on what it must have been like to be butch in New York during the 50s, I thought about how many decades—entire generations— of LGBTQ people have come to NYC for exactly that reason, hoping to find community. And I thought about how I didn’t, and that i’m grateful I’m here for another reason and not that, because it means the world is better now because I didn’t feel that pull. Except I’m wrong. Because I did.
When I was applying to PhD programs, and people asked me why CUNY, I told people I liked the flexibility of the curriculum, the preponderance of archives and other schools and resources that would be available to me, the different certificates available, that I could study rhetoric without having to only study rhetoric, and the fact that New York would also be a good location for my partner, who works in theatre. And all of that is true.
But I made a joke while writing my personal statement that the most accurate way to paraphrase what I wanted to say was, “Please let me come to your school, because you’re gay and I’m gay and I want to study gay things.”
I came here for graduate school, but I came here for graduate school in part because I wanted openly queer teachers doing openly queer scholarship and an environment that would let me do the same.