Hindsight bias

In Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel uses the reconstruction of memories to reinterpret specific events so that she can discover her father’s and her own homosexuality. As the narrator, Alison reconstructs her memories with pictures, letters, literature, diary entries, and dialogue. In forming her own sexuality and gender identity, she looks back upon her memories to reanalyze them with the knowledge of her father also being gay. As a result of hindsight bias, she understands events differently now than how she once regarded them before. She can extract details and patterns as she moves the narrative in a non-linear manner from one scene of her childhood to that of her young adulthood. Rather than writing events as a chain reaction, she provides snippets of scenes; consequently, the reader has to glean important revelations and details to connect as one main message. Her writing mimics the mental process that she would have undertaken as she recalled past events to determine hidden facts that were once indecipherable when they took place. She would have needed to delve into her own memories and murkydiary entries out of order to reevaluate herself and her dad under their newly revealed discoveries. After tracing through random memories, she could draw from them a complete meaning to her life and identity in tandem with her father’s.

            By running through both of their lives simultaneously, she demonstrates the changing times. During her time period, she is able to embrace her sexuality in a supportive community, whereas her father’s homosexuality remains covert until Alison comes out. Ultimately, they both come out at the same time even though her father has known that he is gay for years. However, Bruce does not even outright acknowledge his homosexuality, for it is his wife that reveal the affairs and confides in Alison. Therefore, Alison declares that “I shouldn’t pretend to know what my father was…perhaps my eagerness to claim him as “gay” in the way I am “gay,” as opposed to bisexual or some other category, is just a way of keeping him to myself” (230). As a result of their shared identity, Alison connects with her father toward the end of his life. Thus, she attempts to compare their situations, yet, as she connects all the pieces, she realizes that they are not completely comparable. They grew up in different times; Bruce could not fully embrace himself because he struggled with shame. In essence, their shared homosexuality allows them to have bonding time, but their dissimilar experiences create a chasm and leads them to very different endings, where one ends in a lie and the other begins in a truth.