"Fun House" Hits Home

As discomfiting as it is to admit, most of my favorite childhood memories of my father are when he was drunk.  Much like Alison Bechdel’s, mine is not a “physically expressive family” (19), and only in infrequent instances is it even a verbally expressive one. So, on the rare occasions when my mother had to drive my father home from an evening out, I learned to look forward to the uncharacteristic affection that he inevitably lavished on me, his normally stoic demeanor uninhibited by alcohol.

It became something like a ritual – he would go into the living room and turn on an old, live in concert, U2 DVD, at which my mother would roll her eyes and head off to bed, and, after the first two or three songs, I’d casually wander into the living room. My father would invite me onto the couch, where I curled up against his shoulder. Then, without fail, he would bemoan the downfall of modern music and boast about how great the oldies were, and I would ignore it, thrilled just to be cuddled up next him while he stroked my hair, to have this physical confirmation that he loved me. I suppose it’s kind of sad in some ways, but to me it’s simply familiar; my father is the way he is, and it’s difficult to begrudge him that.

In “Fun Home”, Alison Bechdel seems to struggle with a similarly dysfunctional relationship with her father, despite the fact that her novel thus far pays a hefty tribute to him. She employs a wide range of literary allusions when referring to her father, a nod to his position as an English teacher and love of reading, and there is also a fixation on death, attributed to her father’s work as a mortician and his death for which Bechdel feels in some way culpable.

As Bechdel says on page 22, “although I’m good at enumerating my father’s flaws, it’s hard for me to sustain much anger at him.” I think that this stems from a difficulty in reconciling the guilt Bechdel feels surrounding her father’s death, and the sometimes confusingly inexplicable love children feel toward their parents, with the man that her father actual was: reserved, abrasive, and volatile.

There is a metaphor used on page 22, in which Bechdel describes her father bathing her as a child, where she says, “The suffusion of warmth as the hot water sluiced over me… the sudden, unbearable cold of it’s absence.” I found this metaphor to be poignant in embodying the hardship of being a child desperate for parental affection; the “unbearable cold” of apathy overwrites the logic that perhaps seeking approval from such a dubious father figure is not a worthy goal.  

“Fun House” is the text I've related to most during this course. I think one of the most amazing things a writer can do is capture, in words, some perfect sentiment or representation of the human experience, and Alison Bechdel has (for me) achieved this several times over just within the first 100 pages.

P.S. Professor S will be pleased to know that that Oxford English Dictionary and I spent a lot of quality time together during this reading!