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The final sections of the memoir explore different facets of loss, from loss of innocence to stymied grief to thwarted connections. In “Ideal Husband,” Bechdel juxtaposes the story of her first period with Bruce’s sexual predation, which both occur the summer she is 13 years old. Alison avoids discussing her first period with anyone, neglecting at first to even mention it in her diary and then writing about it only in code. This silence illustrates her discomfort with puberty, which Bechdel, at one point, refers to as a “horror.” At the same time, Alison is aware that Bruce is having legal troubles because he gave alcohol to an underage boy, though she isn’t aware that he did so because he was sexually interested in the boy and his brother. When Alison is about to finally tell her mother about her period, Helen tells her the family may have to move because of Bruce’s legal problems. As Alison is grappling with her perceived loss of innocence, Bruce is preying on boys not much older than she is, posing a threat to their innocence. Bruce’s criminal intentions are not named by anyone, not even by the court, a silence that speaks to the shame surrounding Bruce’s actions.

Bechdel also explores how her relationship to the truth changes throughout her diaries when she is a teenager, which is most apparent in her discussions of puberty and sexuality. Before puberty, Alison had been obsessed with the truth and her diaries had been faithful representations of reality. But as she gets older, hesitation, doubt, posturing, exaggeration, and self-deception sneak into her entries. Though Alison is drawn to men’s fashion periodicals, she feigns indifference to them in her diary, which Bechdel notes is a form of self-rejection as she is hiding this interest even from herself. This entry is set between a scene in which Alison dresses up in Bruce’s suits and one in which she goes clothes shopping with him. Though their shared love of masculine aesthetics occasionally brings them closer, this connection is tenuous, as Bruce sometimes forces her to be more feminine than she wants to be. Alison also writes about her own sexual exploration only in code, hinting that she learns to keep things secret by observing Bruce’s silences and omissions. Soon, these coded pages give way to empty ones, suggesting that silence and secrecy overtook Alison’s impulse toward telling the truth.

Read more about Main Idea #1: It is impossible to know the truth, within oneself or within others.

In the final chapter, “The Antihero’s Journey,” Bechdel explores Bruce’s many conflicting aspects. When Alison takes a trip to New York with her father and brothers, they stay, as they often do, in the West Village, and Alison realizes that they are surrounded by gay men. For the first time, she feels open to the joy and possibility of being immersed in a gay world. However, when her youngest brother John wanders off, Bruce fears he’ll be preyed on by men who are sexually attracted to young boys. John narrowly escapes the advances of a man, a chilling scene that elucidates Bruce’s cognitive dissonance—he is both a concerned father and a sexual predator himself. Bechdel also explores how Bruce’s internal schisms parallel contradictions within their relationship. When she was a child, she remembers him as cold, malevolent, and neglectful, without much use for her. But as she got older, they had begun to connect. However, even in moments of connection, such as a conversation in the car when they discuss their shared gayness, a sense of coldness and distance remains, and Bechdel, in the wake of her father’s death, is left to guess how he really felt about her. 

Bechdel returns to literature as a means of understanding Bruce and feeling close to him, since the closest Bechdel ever feels to him is when they are discussing literature. In high school, she takes a literature course that her father  teaches, and, ironically, through discussing books in a classroom setting, Alison experiences a sense of intimacy with her father that she rarely feels at home. The apex of their closeness is when they are the most geographically distant. When Alison goes away to college, Bruce often writes her letters, using books as a means of discussing himself. He even paraphrases James Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel the two had read together, in his first letter to Alison about his choice to remain closeted. Bruce takes a keen interest in her education, essentially taking her literature classes alongside her and avidly recommending books to her. One of these books is Earthly Paradise, an autobiography by the French author Collette, a book Alison loves for its lesbian content. One of the only (and the last) open conversations the two have about their queerness begins as a conversation about Bruce giving Alison the book, a conversation that, as it moves away from literature, fails to bring Alison the closeness she craves.

Read about the Main Idea (#2) describing how literature and art allow Alison to connect with her father.

Throughout the final sections, Bechdel explores the way Alison and her father both mirror and oppose each other. But neither orientation, whether opposites or reflections, seems to close the gap between the two. In their final discussion of their sexualities, her father says he used to dress up in girls’ clothes as a child, and Alison, eager to connect, reminds him she used to dress up like a boy. This moment both emphasizes the way they are “inversions” of each other (a boy who wants to be like a girl, a girl who wants to be like a boy) and similar (both uncomfortable with the expectations of the gender they were assigned at birth). However, Alison’s bid for connection is met with silence. Looking back, she wonders who in the conversation was the father and who was the child, feeling like their relationship was also inverted in that moment, as though her father was a child making a shameful confession to his parent.

Read an explanation of an important quote about Alison’s complicated relationship with her father.

On the final page of Fun Home, Bechdel returns to the discussion of Icarus and Daedalus that opened the memoir, further exploring and correcting the inversion between herself and her father. The first chilling image on the page depicts the truck from Bruce’s point of view as he’s about to be struck by it. In this panel, Bechdel compares his suicide to Icarus’s fall, casting him as the son and herself as the watching, helpless, grief-stricken father. In the next panel, the final image of the memoir, Alison is a child, jumping into the pool as her father waits to catch her. This image, echoing the memoir’s first images of Alison balancing above Bruce as they play airplane, corrects the inversion that has destabilized them throughout the memoir: her father is Daedalus, the parent who will catch her if she falls, and she is Icarus, the son, safe to leap forward. The final page carries the dual realities of Bechdel’s life, representing both her father’s darkness and his loving light, and encompassing both her searing pain and her freedom.

Read about an important quote regarding sexual shame and death.

 

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