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Throughout Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel portrays herself at many different ages—as a young child trying to make sense of her father’s violent outbursts and her own anxiety, as a teen entering into puberty and discovering her artistic self, and in college grappling with her father’s suicide and her own sexual identity. Bechdel explores each self in the context of her father, who was both omnipresent in her home and psyche and often emotionally (and later, physically) absent, leaving Bechdel struggling to make sense of who she is as the daughter of a highly inconsistent parental figure. Not unsurprisingly, Bechdel finds it difficult to see herself clearly in the strobing light and dark of her father’s love and violence.

As a child, Alison is hypervigilant and anxious, vacillating between watchful concern about her father’s temper and rebellion at his control over her. This rebellion manifests especially around her gender expression. Bruce wants Alison to present as strictly feminine, while Alison herself longs to explore androgyny and more masculine-presenting behaviors and attire. Bruce similarly attempts to control and correct Alison’s artistic expression, such as taking over her coloring and adding an impressive verse to her first attempt at poetry. These have a dampening effect on Alison’s artistic expression, and she abandons poetry and even limits her use of color, as evidenced by her monochromatic graphic memoir. In college, Alison claims her lesbian identity, coming out to her parents and adopting the less stereotypically feminine attire that her father forbade. She is disappointed at her parents’ lackluster reaction to her coming-out. However, just as Alison is beginning to assert her own identity outside of her family unit, her father kills himself, and she’s left with a series of unanswerable questions about who he was—and, moreover, who she is. The memoir is Bechdel’s attempt to answer those questions. 

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