It is impossible to know the truth, within oneself or within others.

Throughout Fun Home, Bechdel illustrates how much she (Alison) struggles throughout her life to know the truth, whether the truth of her own reality or of the internal worlds within the people she loves. Bechdel feels this struggle most poignantly when she tries to communicate her perception of reality in words. When she first starts keeping a daily journal at the encouragement of her father (who even writes the first line of her first diary), Alison begins to doubt how she can know anything. She uses the constant interjection “I think” to hedge her declarative sentences, no matter how faithfully her sentences describe events, such as the seemingly indisputable assertion “I made popcorn.” This constant Cartesian notation eventually morphs into a symbol that Alison writes in between sentences, over proper nouns, and across entire pages until her diary pages become nearly illegible. In this way, Alison’s doubt about the possibility of ever truthfully articulating reality entirely obscures all her sentences until the doubt itself is more legible than the sentences describing her life.

This interrogation into what is real is a hallmark of her memoir as well, as Bechdel considers multiple possible realities of her father’s unknown internal world. Throughout his life, her father Bruce remained distant from Alison: he isn’t physically affectionate, is absorbed in his solitary creative pursuits, fabricates who he is at home, and keeps secrets about his queer identity from her. In this way, the truth of who her father was, in the wake of his suicide, is permanently unknowable to Alison. Thus, the reality Bechdel constructs in her memoir about her father leaves room for many conflicting possibilities: he is an abusive father and an incandescently loving father, his absence resonates throughout her childhood and his omnipresence is stifling, his death could have been an accident and his death is likely a suicide. By holding many conflicting realities in her memoir simultaneously, Bechdel gestures toward the fundamental mystery at the core of other people and of herself.

Art and beauty create either connection or isolation.

Alison finds solace, understanding, and inspiration in works of art and in the act of creation. When Bechdel wants to know her dead father or her own elusive self, she doesn’t talk to people. Instead, referencing everything from great works of literature like Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady to pop culture works like The Addams Family, Bechdel peers into works of art as mirrors to understand herself and her family. Thus, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby lends insight to Bruce’s tendency to create his own reality. And it’s Marcel Proust, not Bruce, who teaches Bechdel about the relationship between her father’s love of gardening and his love of men. Similarly, Bechdel notes that she first understood herself to be a lesbian not through experiences with other people but through the written work of other writers. When she does begin sleeping with women, books remain in the foreground, as she and her first girlfriend have sex on a bed covered in sapphic literature. Sex and art are also conflated for Bechdel when she is the one holding the pen: she first experiences sexual pleasure when she’s sitting at her drawing table, working on a piece of art.

However, art and beauty are not always sources of discovery and solace. Bechdel observes that her family is like an artist colony, with each member locked away in their own rooms, fully absorbed in solitary creative endeavors. While these endeavors—from drawing and designing to playing music and rehearsing for plays—provide spiritual sustenance, they also take on an obsessive energy, as though each person is trying to fill with art something that is missing in their family. Bechdel often feels jealous of her parents’ creative pursuits because they take them away from her. In the opening scene of the memoir, Alison experiences a rare moment of closeness with her father, as she’s balanced precariously on his upturned feet, playing airplane. His affection and touch are fleeting as he soon becomes absorbed in a household task, abandoning Alison in favor of interior decorating. In another childhood scene, Alison tells her mother she is hungry and is brushed off because Helen is fully absorbed in playing the piano. While art allows Bechdel to connect to herself and, obliquely, to imagine she knows her parents, it is also integral to the sense of isolation that permeates the Bechdel household.

Secrets create suffering within families.

Secrets create distance, isolation, and pain in Fun Home. Bruce hides his gay identity from his family, and Bechdel suggests that this lifelong repression of his sexual truth is akin to a kind of death. Throughout Fun Home, Alison’s father is an often angry figure, expecting perfection from his three children and punishing them emotionally and physically when they fail to meet his standards. This exacting, relentless atmosphere suggests that Bruce is similarly unyielding with himself, as he is required to constantly police himself in order to maintain his secret. When Bruce tells Alison he’s going to see a psychiatrist, he says that it’s because he’s bad, not good like Alison, a bald expression of shame that suggests that her father doesn’t consider himself worthy of the family he created. Bruce’s belief that he is fundamentally bad is corrosive to his entire family, as his wife and children must monitor themselves to ensure they never say anything to trigger his shame, which often manifests in angry outbursts and physical abuse.

The strain of Bruce’s secrets and lies also alienates Alison from herself. Depictions of Alison’s first experiences with obsessive-compulsive disorder are juxtaposed with scenes of her parents fighting about why Bruce is late, hinting that he may have been out with a man. This suggests that Alison is trying to self-soothe in a home that is out of balance, in which her parents fight because Bruce’s secrecy is sometimes unbearable. Bruce’s internal war and clandestine dalliances with men and boys take up so much space in their family that they often eclipse Alison’s fledgling explorations into her own sexuality and her understanding of her gender. Though Alison shows a clear and constant preference for masculine-leaning attire from a very young age, this mode of gender expression is quashed constantly by her father. Perhaps, Bechdel speculates, her father demands that Alison conform to the expectations of her gender because he is denied an outlet for his own gender-nonconformity. When Alison does come out to her parents at age 19, this disclosure is overshadowed by her mother’s confession that her father is a closeted gay man. Bechdel is overwhelmed by the revelation and by the way it eclipses her own journey.

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