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Throughout the first two chapters of Fun Home, Bechdel explores the dichotomies that defined her life growing up. Her father, Bruce Bechdel, is closeted throughout Bechdel’s childhood and dies by suicide when Bechdel is 19. He is both a controlling, abusive authoritarian and an occasionally loving parent, and it’s this dual nature that Bechdel tries to reconcile throughout the memoir. The memoir opens with Alison playing airplane with her father, balanced on his upturned feet, experiencing a rare moment of physical closeness as she soars above him. Her father quickly interrupts this game to focus on perceived imperfections in their house, ordering Alison to fetch him tools so he can fix them. This moment encapsulates how Alison longs for her father’s attention and often experiences it only in fleeting moments. It also illustrates how her father focuses on the meticulous care of his house over attentive care of his family, the appearance of perfection over the experience of intimacy. Bechdel illustrates her father’s abuse but never names it explicitly in her text, paralleling the way his anger, physical outbursts, and controlling nature hold a silent tyranny over their household as Alison is growing up.

Read an in-depth analysis of Alison Bechdel’s father, Bruce Bechdel.

While depicting herself playing airplane with her father, Bechdel discusses the Greek myth of Daedalus, the master craftsman and inventor, and his son, Icarus. Daedalus creates wings so that Icarus can escape a labyrinth he also created, which is guarded by a frightening minotaur (a creature that is half-man, half-bull). Though Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, Icarus ignores his father’s warning out of hubris and plummets to his death. Emphasizing Bruce’s complex nature, Bechdel casts him as every character in this myth. She compares him to Icarus to evoke her father’s hubris, but also calls him Daedalus for his meticulous attention to design and artifice and for his ability to prioritize his art over the humans in his life. As Daedalus created the labyrinth, so does Bruce create an ornate, labyrinthine house that Alison finds difficult to escape, both physically and emotionally. Bechdel also compares her father to the minotaur, overlaying textual descriptions of the minotaur with images of her father’s abuse of Alison and her two brothers. These juxtapositions emphasize Bruce’s duality as both a sometimes-loving man and a violent, out-of-control monster.

Read an explanation of an important quote about Bruce’s present-absence as a theme in the novel.

In “A Happy Death,” Bechdel explores how her personal experience of grief in the wake of her father’s death contrasts with conventional reactions to death. She learns of her father’s death from a phone message while in her college library and experiences a sense of bifurcation as she bikes to her apartment: the nonchalant nature of the ride is in stark contrast to her profound shock, creating a feeling of uncanniness that continues throughout the early days of Bechdel’s mourning. In another post-mortem scene, Alison and her brother greet each other with gruesome smiles, an outward expression of the absurdity of death. Bechdel pairs these scenes with early memories of growing up in a funeral home (ironically nicknamed the “fun home,” the origin of the memoir’s title), which has been the Bechdel family business for generations. Bruce is an undertaker, so Alison and her brothers spend much of their childhoods playing around coffins, dead bodies, and funerals, which Alison says is partially responsible for their unconventional reactions to death. She also compares the Bechdels to the fictional, macabre Addams Family, which emphasizes the gothic strangeness of her family life, her family’s nearness to death and darkness, and their complex rejection of conformity.

Read more about the background of the author of Fun Home, Alison Bechdel.

Bruce, who dies when he is struck by a truck while crossing the highway, maintains a sense of artifice and secrecy even in his death. Though Bruce’s death is ruled an accident, Alison and her mother, Helen, are certain it is actually a suicide. By posing his death as an accident, Bruce conceals his unhappiness from those around him and  the secret shame he harbors over his sexual relationships with teenage boys. Bechdel also reveals that Helen had asked Bruce for a divorce two weeks prior to his suicide, suggesting that the public image he crafted to hide his gay identity was crumbling. Bechdel juxtaposes these reflections on her father’s death with a memory from her childhood when her father shows her a dead body on the embalming table. Bechdel wonders if her father wanted to see grief or disgust on Alison’s young face because he was unable to access these feelings himself. Bechdel identifies with wanting to provoke in others the emotions she is unable to feel herself, which suggests that the memoir itself may also be a means for Bechdel to evoke difficult emotions in her readers that she struggles to access on her own.

Read more about Main Idea #3: Secrets create suffering within families. Secrets create suffering within families.

Next section 3. That Old Catastrophe & 4. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

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