Fun Home's Experimental Form

Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home depicts her life through cartoons, using both words and pictures to convey her story. Through this work, form becomes as interesting and important as content. Bechdel’s work is unlike any other that I have ever read. While Bechdel is certainly not the first to tell as a story using words and pictures, in a comic-book-style, the subject of her work is far from typical when looking at such a form. When I think of comics, I tend to think of superheroes, or fictional characters. However, Bechdel tells the story of her life, specifically during her childhood, and with regard to her relationship with her father, through this text. Bechdel’s recollection is not a simple, easy to read tale. It is not, as one would initially assume, told in a “PG” way, even though, in a sense, it is a ‘picture book.’ Bechdel instead touches on very graphic, and at times disturbing, occasions. She deals with topics of death and suicide, of sex and the act of ‘coming out’ to one’s family as a homosexual, and many other personal, and mature topics. By choosing to discuss such topics in this form, rather than through a traditional narrative, Bechdel is very experimental with her work. She departs from the conventions of the genre of the memoir, as well as from the traditional comic book. This literary move adds to the reader’s understanding of her story, and subsequently of her life. Lines and pictures powerfully surprise the reader quite frequently, adding an element of suspense to the work. Thus, the tale is not predictable, or conventional in any way. This is much like Bechdel’s life, which in many ways goes against cultural norms. The novel employs irony in many ways, such as through the title and the fact that a place that deals so much with death is called a “fun home.” What the reader expects going in is, time and time again, turned upside-down. Throughout the work, Bechdel is able to tell and show her own story in a very compelling way. She brings up themes of loneliness, isolation, time, and one’s ability to adapt, cope, and change, which have made appearances in many of the works we have read thus far in class in a very different way through this experimental work, which in itself has faced several challenges upon publication, much as Bechdel has faced throughout her life.