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Bechdel repeatedly looks to fiction as a way to understand her parents’ hostile relationship and the coldness of her childhood. Bruce often lives in fictions he creates, from his lies about his sexuality and extramarital relationships with boys to the meticulous physical artifice of their museum-like home to fantasies meant to escape the realities of his heterosexual family life. Because Bruce hides himself from his family, including young Alison, within these fictions, Bechdel turns to the novels he loved in order to better understand him in her memoir. In “That Old Catastrophe,” she interprets young Bruce during his courtship with Helen through his obsession with the author F. Scott Fitzgerald. Bechdel finds particular parallels between her father and Jay Gatsby, the protagonist of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, as both men seek to transform themselves from drab, unspectacular beginnings both through force of will and by cultivating intricate illusions.

Read more about Main Idea #1: Art and beauty create either creation or isolation.

Similarly, Bechdel turns to fiction to understand Helen, who, though more honest with her children than Bruce, keeps herself apart from Alison, spurring Bechdel to search within novels and plays for ways to understand her mother, too. Bechdel’s parents met at a performance of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, in which Helen played the lead role of Katherine. Thus, from the very beginning of her parents’ relationship, the line between reality and performance is blurred. Bechdel sees parallels between the way Katherine’s spirit is broken by her love interest in the play and the way Helen’s light is dimmed by her marriage to Bruce. Bechdel also does a close reading of the character Isabel Archer from Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady, a vibrant woman who marries beneath her station and becomes trapped in a conventional life. This illustrates Bechdel’s belief that her father’s rage, abuse, secrecy, and lies have taken something vital from her mother.

Bechdel comes to understand Bruce’s sexuality through a close reading of the work of Marcel Proust, the gay author whose work Bruce was reading in the year before his death. Bechdel sees parallels between a scene of erotic love in a garden in Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time and her father’s own obsessive gardening. She suggests that Bruce and Proust both tended to fall in love with straight men, which gives Bechdel new insight into his affair with her childhood babysitter, Roy. Proust also plays with the genders of his characters, basing the young girl in a garden scene on his beloved male chauffeur, and similarly, Bechdel observes a gender inversion between her and her father. Bechdel sees something other than masculinity in her father’s adoration of flowers, a lack of masculinity that she, herself, tries to fill in their family. For example, Alison is drawn to masculine attire as a means of understanding herself, but this process is routinely quashed by her father’s desire to express his own femininity through a young Alison.

Read a short essay about style and presentation of the graphic memoir entitled “Images & the Unspeakable in Fun Home.”

Bechdel also turns to books first to understand herself and her own sexuality. For example, she first sees the word lesbian in the dictionary when she is 13, and then in college, she continues her hunt for images of herself when she discovers myriad books about lesbianism at the bookstore and library. Though her father routinely polices her gender expression, Alison finds the freedom to finally explore her own identity in books, which gives her the courage to connect with other lesbians in real life. She comes out to her parents by writing a letter—a literary medium—before she’s ever had a sexual experience with a woman, and though she’s sure she knows herself, her revelation is overshadowed by her mother’s confession that Bruce has repeatedly slept with men and boys. This illustrates how Bruce’s struggles with his sexual identity routinely overshadow Alison’s own self-exploration. When Alison does get a girlfriend, her reliance on the literary to understand herself continues. She and her girlfriend, Joan, have sex in a bed surrounded by books, and Alison’s sexual awakening is deeply intertwined with her love of the literary and of language.

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

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