A Family Tragicomic “fun Home”

A family Tragicomic “Fun Home”

Fun home a tragicomic graphic memoir written by Alison Bechdel, documents the author’s discovery of her own and her father’s as Lesbian and Gay. The book write in many different themes. Including sexual orientation, family bond, also the suicide. Unlike other biographies, Bechdel uses the comics graphic medium to write about her past. Fun Home also appears to be Bechdel’s attempting to reach closure with her father, at the final panel that “he was there to catch me when I leapt”. Bechdel allows us to witness the existing of the tenderness between father and daughter’s relation.

Bechdel and her father share many traits: they are both gay, even though Bechdel’s father trying to hide himself and got married to his wife in the early age during the military. They both have passion toward arts and literature, and they both wish that they were born the opposite sex. All these similarities bring them together and made them apart, during her father’s existing period, they never seem been able to develop a strong and close relationship.  Due to their  kind of personalities trait. Whereas Bechdel’s father tends be more feminine, one of the photo Bechdel  discovered from his father’s possession was whe wore the women’s swim suit give us the clearer hint of his identity trait. Bechdel also revealed herself been as “a connoisseur of masculinity” during her earlier age. So, even with many identical interest and hobbies they couldn’t even be able to connect themselves together as daughter and father.

In an early age, Bechdel shows us how she struggles to emphasize her interest been as man while her father trying to prevent her from expressing it. For a long times the differences and tensions was there between Bechdel and her father. While bring us back through her memories of her childhood, Bechdel offers us every little bits of her life. She showed out her deserted relationship with her father, the collapse of her parents' marriage and her discovery and explorations adventure of her sexuality. Her father presented in the whole story as a indispensable character to give us a completion of Bechdel’s life: their father-daughter relationship, her homosexuality, her father's hidden sex identification and later to his own death.