FUN HOME 233
and peers in college. Th at she communicates to her father through letters and literature
is likewise unsurprising.
In the chapters that follow, Bechdel moves back and forth in time as the reader
follows her journey of self-discovery. In chapter four, she explores her memories
which, now in retrospect, off ered clues to his sexual orientation, and she intermingles
clues from her own childhood that signaled her own sexual orientation. At the end of
the chapter, she holds two photos in her hands—one of her father at the age of 22,
lounging on the roof of his fraternity house and the other of herself at the age of 21,
standing on a fi re escape. She questions whether his photo was likewise taken by a
lover as hers was, and she tellingly uses a textual metaphor to express the similarities
of the photos and the people within them, “it’s about as close as a translation can get.”
Chapter fi ve details her introduction to writing diaries, which dovetails into an ex-
planation of her brief bout with obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is at this stage that
Bechdel fully brings to the forefront how memories can be altered and elided, by not-
ing what she had omitted from her own entries — omissions now glaring in retrospect.
In chapter six she interweaves her mother’s preparation for an Oscar Wilde play with
her father’s trial that threatened to expose his secrets to the community when he was
accused of providing alcohol to a 17-year-old boy. Wilde was tried for “indecency” (or
for being openly homosexual) and the trial was a national sensation. Bruce Bechdel’s
trial, on the other hand, quietly ended with mandatory counseling. In the fi nal chap-
ter, Bechdel depicts the few moments with her father where she could discuss their
sexual orientation. Th e scenes are full of misfi res and muted miscommunications, but
Bechdel presents them as treasured memories and ends her book with a salute to him.
In her metaphor, her “Icarus” does not plummet into the sea; instead, her father has
caught her.
In preparation for this project, Bechdel revisited the novels that she shared with her
father and read biographies of the famous fi gures who loom large in her story — James
Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Albert Camus. She painstakingly
took reference pictures for all the characters in her book, often posing for them her-
self in recreating events. Th e faded green of the two-tone comic replicates an emotion
of feeling faded or washed out, as if the memories have bled out from the text. At
the same time, the careful recreation of background and items give a feeling of stifl ing
weight. Her characters’ faces lack emotional punch; she often depicts their faces as
tight and unemotional. Her art meticulously recreates family photographs, diction-
ary entries, diaries, literary texts, and maps. She mixes text and image, creating text
as image, not only in replicating pages from her diaries and other printed pages but
also in preserving whatever marginalia and underlining she fi nds. In this, her desire to
recreate these primary documents is reminiscent of how Art Spiegelmen , in uncover-
ing his own father’s story, integrated maps and diagrams to authenticate his Holocaust
memoir in Maus.
Fun Home was named one of the best books of 2006 by the New York Times and was
shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It also won the GLAAD (Gay
and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) media award for Outstanding Comic Book
