When does your story stop?

It is no lie that the bulk of the tragicomic is written reflecting on the death of Alison’s father.  Conventionally, this would be the end of her father’s story, and arguably he opted out in order to end the suffering of hiding his secret. However, the entire meaning of Bechdel’s Fun Home is that indeed her father’s story did not end, but rather it continued to affect those he knew. One simple, real-world example of a never-ending story is of an arbitrary someone passing away, showing that it is not unique to Alison’s narrative.

This follows from the novel without much extraction, but rather with some generalization.  Instead of her father playing a memorably stern character in her childhood, Alison holds onto the positive force he played in her life, namely subtly pushing her to discover her sexuality.  Since this aspect of her life is most directly impacted by her father, it remains where his memory lives on the strongest.  Similarly, if a loved one passes, their story is not over.  Just as Alison’s father’s memory lives on in her newfound self-expression, the memories and impacts of our fallen family members continue to touch us knowingly and unknowingly to this day.

A personal example for me is my grandmother passing away.  I did not have a chance to know her, however I know she was an excellent cook, travelling to Belgium to meet chefs and running her own high-level catering business.  Her passion for cooking fell to my dad after she passed when he inherited all her recipes. These recipes, then, continue to be with us at any and all family holidays.  Now that I have a need to cook for myself, too, I am beginning to learn her recipes.  This, in a way, helps her life story continue to live on through my family and me even decades after her passing.  This style of memory follows very similarly to Alison and her father, except my father would be Alison, reflecting on experiences shared with their lost loved ones.

Another similarity between Alison and her father’s story to everyone else’s is that in Fun Home the memories are rather sporadic. They follow a general timeline, but do not cohesively merge from one to the next, especially between borders.  Symbolically, this harkens to the fact that we do not necessarily choose when we remember things about our past. While certain events, such as Thanksgiving or Christmas force us to remember other similar episodes of our past, we never know when we might remember that our own father came out as an alcoholic or a rather unimportant mannerism.  Both of these, except replace alcoholism with buying beers for young boys, play important roles in Alison’s story, popping into her recollection about her father.  Just as we cannot choose to have her memories follow a specific narrative, neither can she choose when she remembers which episode of her parent’s relationship with her. However, this continuing remembrance asserts itself as another mechanism, by which the loved one lives on.

The fact that people’s stories do not end simply because they might wish them to (ex: Alison’s father’s suicide) is one of the central arguments of Fun Home. The tragicomic toys with the idea of memory explicitly, while suggesting that the memories live on indefinitely.  Bechdel accomplishes this by not specifying when her narrative is written, but by only specifying the narrative time.