139.

109 PRIZE-WINNING FICTION — SUMMER 2019-2020

UNIT TWO: “GENRE DEBATES: ALISON BECHDEL’S F UN H OME ”
STUDY GUIDE

From Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? (2012)

Contents
i. A Dyke to Watch Out For 2

ii. Family/Home, Tragi/Comic, Reading/Life 4

iii. Reading the Art of Comics 8

iv. Major Themes in Fun Home 10

v. Prize-winning and Beyond 13

vi. Bibliography 16

139.109 Unit Three: Study Guide 1

 I. A DYKE TO WATCH OUT FOR
Alison Bechdel was born on September 10, 1960 in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, and spent her
childhood and youth in nearby Beech Creek, the location of the eponymous home where most
of the action in Fun Home takes place. Bechdel studied studio arts and art history at Oberlin
College, graduating in 1981. (Much of her life until her father’s death in 1980, including her
coming out, is recounted in Fun Home, so I won’t go into further detail on that here.) Upon
graduating from Oberlin, Bechdel moved to NYC where, after not getting into any graduate arts
programs, she worked various temp jobs for printing and publishing businesses.
Bechdel started
cartooning out of
frustration with not seeing
any representations of
people like herself in the
world of cartoons and
comics at the time. Her
occasional doodles
became single panel
cartoons, and her first
cartoon was published in
the 1983 Lesbian Pride
issue of her local feminist
[Link] newspaper (in St Paul,
Minnesota). Initially, her
cult series Dykes to Watch Out For (DTWOF) was made up of single panel cartoons and then short
strips which depicted various types of lesbians and were not connected by a stable set of
characters or ongoing storyline. In 1987, with the strip “One Enchanted Evening,” she
introduced the beginnings of a group of recurring characters—with Mo (Monica, a semi-
autobiographical character) as the central protagonist in a varied group of friends—representing
(and poking fun at) numerous ways of being lesbian and queer. The strip appeared every two
weeks and was syndicated to numerous alternative, gay, and lesbian newspapers. As Bechdel
discusses in her “Cartoonist’s Introduction” to
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, which
anthologizes the main storylines of the strip, she
had set out to make lesbians visible in popular
culture (xvii), but she had not anticipated how
beloved this varied group of women (and men)
that she had created would so quickly become:
for many readers, with so few other depictions of
lesbians to turn to, the characters were “-choke-
role models” (ibid.).
Besides the lasting effect it had on queer visibility,
DTWOF made another important contribution to
popular culture, as the source for popularizing
what is now commonly know as the “Bechdel
Test.” Bechdel introduced this “rule” for gauging
women’s representation in films in an instalment
of DTWOF in 1985, attributing it to Liz Wallace.

139.109 Unit Three: Study Guide 2

The rule, as articulated by a character in the strip, is that she will only attend a movie screening if
the film in question meets three requirements:
 It has at least two women in it; who
 talk to each other; about
 something other than a man.
This feminist test has been become widely adopted as the Bechdel Test, or, as Bechdel herself
prefers, the “Bechdel-Wallace Test.” A number of variations on the rule exist. For example,
some stipulate that the women characters need to be named (while others state they do not) and
some assign a minimum length of a minute to the amount of conversation that must transpire
between the women for the film to “pass.” The test has taken on a life of its own since its first
publication in 1985, including adaptations to test for the representation of more varied ethnicity
or sexuality. In many respects, #OscarsSoWhite, for example, is a movement fueled by such
concerns.

Of course, the Bechdel test is a stunningly low bar for the representation of women on screen,
so it can be shocking to see how many films continue to fail the test. You could try out the test
yourself on a television series you like, or on the next few movies you watch. (Partly, this has to
do with the gendered history of the medium—not to mention society at large—which has seen
relatively few female directors and has very infrequently rewarded them: in their long histories,
the Best Director Academy Award and top film prize at Cannes have each only gone to one
woman!) Furthermore, simply including two female characters who have a one-plus-minute
conversation about something other than a man doesn’t immediately guarantee that a film is
actually “feminist,” however it is we interpret that word. While it is easy to point to the
shortcomings of the Bechdel Test as a litmus test for feminism—after all, just because women
have a decent on-screen discussion this doesn’t necessarily mean women actors don’t have

139.109 Unit Three: Study Guide 3

narrow or stereotyped roles; and isn’t there a glaring issue in abstaining from films that you
probably first need to see in order to judge?—it was never meant as a serious tool. Yet, as a way
to raise awareness about the representation of women in cinema it has been quite effective, which is quickly
clear from the spread of the concept in popular culture.
Bechdel wrote regular instalments of DTWOF for twenty-five years and throughout her time
creating Fun Home. She put the strip on hiatus when she was working on her follow-up to Fun
Home, her second graphic memoir Are You My Mother? (2012), in which she focuses on her
experiences in psychoanalysis and her relationship with her mother. (You should definitely read
this text, too, if you enjoyed Fun Home.) In recent years she has occasionally brought the strip out
of retirement to comment on the politics of the day, such as the election of Donald Trump in
2016. She lives in Vermont.

[Link]

II. FAMILY/HOME, TRAGI/COMIC, READING/LIFE

This course is called “Prize-winning Fiction,” and Fun Home is an odd one out in several regards
here: it’s a comic, it uses images and text together, and it is very explicitly not “fiction.” Instead, it
depicts a very personal account by Bechdel of her youth and early college days. There are a few
reasons why I think Bechdel’s memoir is a relevant choice for this particular course: it is
obviously prizewinning, as I will cover in a section below. Further, this course seeks to introduce
you to some of the different forms of writing and narrative, where differing kinds of quality can
be evaluated. You’ve already looked at short stories and will be considering the novel before the
end of the semester. Comics are another common form used to convey narrative, and Fun Home
is an excellent and influential example of comics, or graphic literature. Bechdel herself calls the
book a “family tragicomic,” playing with the labels of genre and immediately drawing attention
to some of the underlying currents in her narrative.
The title, Fun Home, at very first blush raises expectations of a house filled with joy and laughter.
Of course, the book quickly clarifies that this epithet, “fun home,” is actually the Bechdel
family’s nickname for the family business, the Bechdel Funeral Home—fun being short for
“funeral home.” Further, the Bechdels’ family life isn’t all that fun, with Bruce, Alison’s
authoritarian father, who is often depicted as angry and distant, making daily life a bit of a
minefield for his wife and children. But he is good at keeping up appearances of many sorts, and
the title of the book plays along with the game of keeping up surface appearances, a game that in
many ways we see throughout the text: from the outwardly presenting happy family, to the
baroquely decorated family home. The word “tragicomic” is related to tragicomedy, a blend in
drama of comedy and tragedy that can be found not only in some of Shakespeare’s plays, but as
far back as Roman theatre traditions. Like the underlying meanings of “fun home,” the word

139.109 Unit Three: Study Guide 4

“tragicomic” draws attention to the opposing narrative lines and emotional developments the
work portrays: the tragic trajectory of Bruce’s life, (probably) ending with suicide, countered with
the coming-of-age narrative of Alison, who the reader sees growing into her adult self as she
comes out as a lesbian and takes the first steps in the direction of becoming a cartoonist, a
direction that culminated with her completion of Fun Home itself, to wide acclaim and
recognition. Finally, in the book’s subtitle “tragicomic” draws attention to the form of the work,
which is a comic. But where that label “comic” may lead readers to expect a work that is funny
or even childish, this particular comic is anything but funny or childish, not just because it is
tragi(c), but also because of the text’s aspirations toward and its borrowing from high
literature—including through invocations of classical and canonical works, and through its
deployment of complex literary techniques and Bechdel’s artistic handling of serious subject
matter and themes.
The form of comics is cursed with labels that don’t
quite fit. While comics can be comedic, they very
often are not. Similarly, the term “graphic novel”
carries meanings beyond what the words suggest
on the surface. In common usage, “graphic novel”
denotes long-form comics, or, as Art Spiegelman
has called them, “a long comic book that need[s] a
bookmark.” However, the use of the term “novel”
implies that these works are fiction, while in
actuality many of the most famous graphic novels
are biography, memoir, history, or journalism in
comics form. Some well-known examples are Maus,
by Art Spiegelman (1986, 1991), Palestine, by Joe
Sacco (1993), and Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi
(2003). Fun Home is in very good company, then, in
its blending of genres and blurring of boundaries,
while the tensions of external appearance and
expectations with internal truth are also particularly
suited to the story the book itself tells.
Another reason why this particular graphic novel struck me as relevant to this course, despite not
being “fiction” per se, is due to the importance that fiction has in Fun Home, thematically
speaking. This includes the fiction of Bruce’s life (i.e., the way in which his life is a kind of lie, or
a story, perhaps like all of our lives), but also the role of literature in his life, in Alison’s life, and
as a mediating structure in their father-daughter relationship. In the caption narration, Alison
even writes at one point, “my parents are most
real to me in fictional terms” (67). She says her
father is like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character,
while her mother “stepped right out of Henry
James” (66). Fun Home is steeped in literary
allusions such as these, making it a highly
literary and erudite graphic novel, as it self-
consciously situates itself within this longer
tradition. In her article “Collective Reading and
Communities of Practice,” Margaret Simon
mentions that some critics “have seen this
reliance [on literary references] as a means of
legitimation...—a bid, perhaps, for her own
position within a community of authors” (145).

139.109 Unit Three: Study Guide 5

I would very much doubt that motive, as I think Bechdel would be quite aware that literary
snobs are often inherently put off by the form of comics itself, and a smattering of literary
allusions, even to Modernist masterpieces like À la recherche du temps perdu, would not quell their
more abiding suspicion of the form. Rather, Bechdel is creating a challenge to her reader by
weaving in a deep intertextuality with famous but not necessarily widely-read works of literature,
from James Joyce and Marcel Proust to Oscar Wilde and Wallace Stevens, with a bit of The Wind
in the Willows thrown in for variation. For someone like me, a comics scholar with a background
in English literary studies, this comic is perfect, in that it brings together a number of my
interests. For a more general comics readership,
the expectation that readers of Fun Home will
come to it already familiar with not just The Great
Gatsby, but also The Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man and Ulysses, as well as Colette’s memoirs, is
probably not always realistic. However, Bechdel
manages to fully explain the significance of these
works to herself and her family without relying
on too much prior knowledge and without
turning the comic into a tutorial. What comes
across most clearly, it seems to me, is the deep
love of reading that is engrained in Alison and her
father, and the formative effect reading can have
on identity. One could even say that she comes to
understand her sexuality, in part, through
James Joyce
encounters with language—through reading.
Michelle Miller points out that over the course of Fun Home, “Bruce is shown reading or
discussing over 20 books, while Alison reads or discusses over 50” (406). She notes, too, that
“textual relationships create openings through which the future can be imagined” (ibid.), in her
article “‘Whatever Else May Be Going On’: Sharing Books in Bechdel’s Fun Home.” This
foregrounding of the act of reading and the (potential) relationship between fiction and identity
is another reason why, though this course has a focus on fiction, I think this non-fiction work
makes for an interesting addition. As you read this graphic novel, keep an eye out for those
literary references and how they help structure the work, as well as noting the depictions of
characters reading and writing.

TASK
Using no more than a single sheet of paper, create a comic strip depicting your morning
routine.
You could use the daily newspaper strip format of only three-five panels, possibly even with
the obligatory gag in the final panel, as you can see in these examples, both from the long-
running newspaper strip Nancy:

Olivia James, 2018

139.109 Unit Three: Study Guide 6

 Ernie Bushmiller, 1947

If you think a single strip won’t capture your point, you can choose to make
a slightly longer strip, filling several tiers, like the DTWOF page I discussed
earlier.
Now create something that reflects your experience. It is fine if you just
create “thumbnail sketches,” which is what cartoonists call quick pen or
pencil sketches that often serve as the first very rough draft. This stage may
include character design and settling on a visual style, as well as the
beginnings of page layout and the breakdown of the action. On the following
page is an example of thumbnails by Jeff Weigel.

You can read more about thumbnailing and further stages

involved here:
[Link]
For this task, it’s fine if you stick to the thumbnail stage. But if
you’re having fun with your strip, feel free to go further, creating
more worked out pencils, or even inks and colour. If you want,
share a picture of your efforts on Stream!

139.109 Unit Three: Study Guide 7

 III. READING THE ART OF COMICS
The exercise of reducing your morning routine down to a single strip hopefully gave you a sense
of the process of storytelling in comics, which among other things entails leaving things out, and
relying on readers to make connections and inferences. Some cartoonists call this showing the
“pregnant moments,” which are most suggestive of what came before and comes next, without
necessarily showing the main action itself. You might like to reflect on the effect of this strategy,
which I think has in part to do with not wanting to spoon-feed the reader, who is more than
capable of understanding narrative when it isn’t spelled out for her in overbearing detail.
You will also have had a taste of the different storytelling tools available to a cartoonist:

1. IMAGES, which includes characters, their clothes, and their body language, as well
as foregrounds and backgrounds, or mise-en-scène.
2. The STYLE OF THE IMAGES, not just what they actually represent. This will include
the types of linework, which may be smooth or sketchy, perhaps with lots of
shading and hatching, and can include colour or not, as well as point of view or
“camera angle.”
3. TEXT IN SPEECH BALLOONS AND CAPTIONS – as well as ICONOTEXTS, which are
worlds and letters in the pictures, part of the world being represented (the DTWOF
example above included iconotexts on the film posters and signage of the cinema).
4. The VISUAL STYLE OF THE CAPTIONS AND WORDS IN SPEECH BALLOONS: these
don’t just convey what is being said (or narrated), they also visually attempt to
convey how things are being said.
5. PANEL BORDERS.
6. PAGE LAYOUT.

139.109 Unit Three: Study Guide 8

These last two work together, since the shape of the panel borders is part of the layout, and the
appearance of these borders—thick, thin, jagged, non-existent—all affect what the design of the
page overall is going to be as well. You may have consciously used all these tools (and more)
already, while you were making your strip, or you may have made decisions about them without
really realizing you were using the artistic and literary “tools” of comics. As a professional
cartoonist for many years, we can assume that Bechdel used all of these tools very consciously
and deliberately. So, when you are reading and rereading Fun Home, pay attention to how she is
using them: pay attention to the visual style of her drawings, the choices she’s made regarding
color, the way she breaks down events across panels to narrate them, the role of captions and
speech balloons. In particular, in terms of the story being told overall, pay attention to
repetitions and gaps, as they are clues to the things that are important within the narrative. Many
of the tools I have just mentioned are specific to the form of comics, but the last ones, related to
the structure of narrative, of course apply to all forms of storytelling, including short stories,
film, and novels.
If I have one criticism of Fun Home, it’s that it is very text heavy. Almost every panel is preceded
by or incorporates a panel, sometimes several, which almost creates the impression that the text
is the primary way to navigate this work. One might even be tempted to skip reading the images
altogether. That would be a mistake, however, since Fun Home is after all definitely composed in
comics form; comics is the medium that Bechdel has chosen to construct and express her story
after all. As such, it is a visual-verbal blend, as R.C. Harvey called comics, and thus image and
text work together to convey the full meaning of the work. While the emphasis on text may
make the panels come across as merely illustrating the words, careful attention to the images will
show that in fact they are emphasizing, elaborating on, making more nuanced, and sometimes
even countering or contradicting the verbal narration, and it takes careful reading of both the
text and the images in Fun Home to fully understand the work. As you’re reading this graphic
memoir, note pages or panels that you find of particular visual interest, and consider why they’re
important or worth flagging, how they aid in conveying narrative or thematic meaning, what they
disclose or obscure.

From Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

139.109 Unit Three: Study Guide 9

 IV. MAJOR THEMES IN F UN H OME
Bechdel has said that very little actually happens in Fun Home. The main event, she writes, “the
sole dramatic incident … is that my dad dies. Everything else is this extremely involuted
introspection about it all” (quoted in Gardiner, 200). Thus, the plotline of the fragmented and
out-of-sequence narrative focuses on her father’s suicide, with her own coming out as the major
“subplot” (ibid.). That perhaps seems like very little “action” for a book that is over 200 pages
long. What gives this work its weight and intensity is the artful and self-conscious way that
Bechdel interrogates her memories and searches through her family history to make sense of
things.
As the term “memoir” will have already suggested, one of the main themes of Fun Home is
memory. Bechdel as creator, as artificer, sifts through her childhood memories and shows us
“Alison” (her younger, textual self) at different ages, in moments that were key to her
relationship with her father, her understanding of her parents, or her own development as an
individual. In a review of the graphic novel, Merry Gangemi writes that the work is a “self-
conscious personal narrative supported by rich visuals that buffer the reader from the many
violent family episodes in the memoir” (70), and indeed the work shows moments that must
have been difficult for the people involved to experience, and in some cases may be difficult for
us to read. But Bechdel mediates her memories in a number of ways that subdue a purely
emotional response to them: the caption narration frames all the events captured in the book and
her introspections about them. Each of the seven chapters in Fun Home is named after a quote
from a literary text, and the framing device of putting famous works of literature in conversation
with her own life is another way of distancing Bechdel and us from the actual experiences
themselves. In this way, moments in her life become aesthetic events, not just personal
memories. An additional means by which her life becomes an aesthetic act is through the process
of literally turning it all into art: All the images in this work are mediated through Bechdel as the
cartoonist. This makes all these representations personal, as they are all created by her hand, but
they also become less direct, in a sense perhaps less real to the reader, since they are all Bechdel’s
versions of a reality. The perspective on the events which comprise the text might look quite
different through her mother’s eyes, or her brother’s, for example.
Bechdel draws on several extensive and very personal archives to help support her memory in
creating this book, and these sources become another central theme: her diaries, her parents’
letters to each other and to her, pages from books with marginalia, family snapshots and
photographs. All this material is blended into the body of Fun Home by Bechdel’s reproduction
of them: the book doesn’t include the original photos or letters; all these artifacts have been
meticulously copied and reproduced by Bechdel. In an article on the role of reading in Fun Home,
Robin Lydenberg writes that as a result, “their status as objective evidence is weakened; the
drawn photographs are an approximation that cannot escape the subjective trace of [Bechdel’s]
hand and her personal feelings of what the images represent” (150). Bechdel thus shows herself
to be in complete control of these archives: she not only chooses which fragments to share, but
also how to share them. Besides redrawing them, she also often offers her own careful
interpretations or readings of these photographs, such as the key picture of Roy, her babysitter
and her father’s lover at one time (100-1). There is another, less immediately visible way in which
Bechdel controls the representation of her memories and archives, for almost every panel in the
work Bechdel created references photographs she made (reenactments of sorts) in order to
perfect the composition and perspective. For most of the photos she was the model, so
throughout the work she was the stand-in for her father, adding another layer to the theme of
identity that she explores in the book.

139.109 Unit Three: Study Guide 10

 Bechdel in reference photo for Fun Home. Image source:
[Link]

As noted above, one of the prevailing activities in Fun Home is reading, an activity that doesn’t
just define some of the characters in the work, but also defines their relationships. Bruce is
shown interrupted in reading Anna Karenina on the very first page of the work, and he and Alison
discuss and exchange books in some of their most personal interactions with each other over the
course of the pages that follow. Since reading is such an important and prevailing theme in the
work, it behooves us to be careful readers of Bechdel’s book in return. As Lydenberg suggests,
“Bechdel’s readings of photographs in Fun Home provide a model of how to read slowly, how to
linger over detail lovingly and thoughtfully, how to read the intimate embrace of word and
images” (158). Significantly, as this quote demonstrates, reading is an activity not just applied to
text but to various kinds of images as well. Readers of this and all comics are invited to perform
multimodal reading, across a number of different modes or forms, analyzing not just images, or
text, but the juncture where the two meet to create from the collision something new.
While the act of reading is something that is shown and celebrated in the book, it also in some
ways celebrates the notion of being well-read, and to a certain extent reading widely is a help
with reading this graphic novel. Fun Home is consistently intertextual, repeatedly referencing the
titles, characters, storylines and specific passages from famous works of Modernist and other
literature. Bechdel uses these works to relate to her parents, while at the same time such
references become a way to displace emotion. Robin Lydenberg suggests reading is a central
issue to this work in several ways: “In its form as a graphic narrative, Fun Home challenges readers
to navigate two different modes of representation [text and image]; in its themes, Bechdel’s
memoir further challenges readers by leading them, with Alison, through a variety of often
contradictory modes and functions of reading” (136). In relation to the importance of reading,
Judith Kegan Gardiner discusses the “connections between gender and genre” in Fun Home
(190). She is referring to genre in the classical sense, of tragedy and comedy. The way she traces
these genres across the work shows that the intertextuality of Fun Home doesn’t just function on
the surface level of direct reference to specific works of literature. If we accept Gardiner’s
reading of Fun Home, it shows that the work is also infused with intertextuality on a structural
level, reflecting the ancient Greek concepts of genre, whereby the work is simultaneously Bruce’s
tragedy and Alison’s comedy. The work’s subtitle already hinted as much: “A Family
Tragicomic.”
Another theme that runs throughout the graphic novel is identity, which is explored in relation
to the notion of personal truth, since Bechdel seems to say that it is not enough to know oneself
privately; to be fully oneself, one has to be able to be oneself publicly. This book allows her to

139.109 Unit Three: Study Guide 11

show herself, as she lays herself bare to readers to a great degree. She acknowledges the privilege
of being able to do that, recognizing the limits on others not able to do the same, such as her
father due to the time and culture in which he was born and raised. Throughout the work, the
contrasts (and similarities) between herself and her father are key.

In her review, Merry Gangemi writes: “Intentionally or not, Bechdel has created a gothic memoir
brimming with binaries: Cultural sophistication/small-town “alchemist of appearance”;
genuine/”artificer”; Jimmy Stewart/Martha Stewart; Spartan/Athenian; modern/Victorian;
Butch/Nelly; utilitarian/aesthetic (71). I am not sure why Gangemi would doubt that the work is
structured around these binaries intentionally: Bechdel points many of them out quite explicitly
on page 15. Furthermore, much of the book explores their shared but opposing tensions around
masculinity and femininity, with Bruce expressing the femininity he denied himself by imposing
it on Alison in her clothes and hairstyles, while she longs to present herself in a more masculine
way, a form Bruce desired in others but did not embody himself. This theme is explored in depth
in chapter 4, “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.” This section shows Alison’s discomfort
at her father’s love of flowers, which she associates with effeminacy. This is an interesting
example of the expectations regarding traditional gender roles or expression, even from someone
who themselves identifies as queer. Alison may not have known she was queer at the time, or
even a lesbian, but as the scene in a Philadelphia luncheonette demonstrates, she was aware of
being different. The captions to the scene where Alison spots a delivery woman she finds
fascinating read: “I didn’t know there were women who wore men’s clothes and had men’s
haircuts … But like a traveler in a foreign country who runs into someone from home—some
one they’ve never spoken to, but know by sight—I recognized her with a surge of joy” (118). It’s
clear that, again, she finds the words to identify who she saw only later: “The vision of that
truck-driving bulldyke sustained me through the years” (119).
Bechdel can be clear about her own experiences and identity as a lesbian in this work and shows
how she would like to square away her father’s identity and sexuality just as neatly. However, she
acknowledges that she cannot. He tells her about certain experiences with men, with a farm-hand
at age fourteen for example (220), but she shies away from pinning labels on him: “‘Erotic truth’
is rather a sweeping concept. I shouldn’t pretend to know what my father’s was … Perhaps my
eagerness to claim him as “gay” in the way that I am “gay,” as opposed to bisexual or some other
category, is just a way of keeping him to myself” (230).
In a chapter on Fun Home, Hillary L. Chute provides a
close reading of these final pages of the graphic novel,
carefully reading the images against the caption narration
(page 204 onwards), which shows that while the captions
and images in these pages seem unrelated, juxtaposing
the concept of “erotic truth” with panels of a five or six-
year-old Alison playing in a swimming pool with her
father, there are significant ways in which these images
amplify the verbal narration, capturing the emotional
baggage of their relationship and Bechdel’s sense of their
shared sexual identity. For example, Bechdel draws
Alison and Bruce close together, looking and moving in
the same direction, while her mother is separated off in
the distance. (You can access important book, Graphic
Women, through the university library. I highly
recommend her chapter on Bechdel if you’re interested
in reading a major comics scholar’s assessment of the
work.)

139.109 Unit Three: Study Guide 12

While Bechdel is careful not to claim to know this particular Truth about her father, regarding
his sexuality, there is another area where the truth might be contested, where she very strongly
asserts that her truth is the Truth. At the beginning of Chapter 2, she states, “There’s no proof,
actually, that my father killed himself” (27). He stepped into the road carrying a bundle of weeds,
right in front of an oncoming truck. Bechdel follows up describing the circumstances of the days
leading up to his death by pronouncing: “But these are just quibbles. I don’t believe it was an
accident” (28). Her father’s death makes most sense to her as a suicide, and she specifically
relates it to her recent coming out, while he remained in the closet. In the narrative that she
creates of these events, this is presented as the truth. Someone else might point to other factors,
like her mother’s recent filing for divorce. But this story is in Bechdel’s hands and she chooses
what to show and what not to show, what motives to impute, what narrative to frame the family
history. This means she also glosses over certain other uncomfortable truths, like his affairs with
teenagers of an age that would have made any sexual relations they might have had statutory rape
and Bruce a pedophile in the eyes of the law. Margaret Simon points out these uncomfortable
gaps that the book leaves. “In a text so self-conscious about identity and finding a way to live
one’s truth, the unresolved nature of her father’s past is unsettling, particularly in its tacit
association with his unexpressed sexuality … If Bechdel’s account is incomplete, it is still a
presence in the story, not an absence or easy elision: it is the contingent and complex presence
Chute claims for representing trauma in the graphic memoir” (153). If Fun Home shows Bechdel
reclaiming the relationship with her father, it also shows the blind eyes people must sometime
turn, the questions they must refrain from asking to maintain those relationships.

V. F UN H OME : PRIZE-WINNING AND BEYOND

As a literary and comics scholar I tend to try and avoid discussion of work that dwells too
much on the evaluative: whether something is “good” or even “genius” is not really relevant to
my discussion or teaching of a work. It doesn’t even matter whether I particularly like or don’t
like a comic or novel that I discuss. Instead, my focus tends to be on what the work does that
may be interesting, and I hope the discussion above has given you some initial insights into
what is interesting about Fun Home. However, for this particular course we are obviously
invited to consider quality in the sense of excellence worth celebrating and giving prizes to, and
when it comes to Fun Home, I will admit that I do find it brilliant in a number of ways, mainly
to do with the wonderful cartooning and the careful structuring of the narrative that loops
around and repeats certain events, and makes those events mean something slightly different
with each iteration.
Obviously, I am not alone in appreciating this book. Fun Home was very well received,
garnering numerous positive reviews from publications as varied as Off Our Backs, a radical
feminist magazine, and the New York Times. The New York Times Book Review calls the book, “A
pioneering work pushing two genres – comics and memoir – in multiple new directions.” (I
must amend this review by clarifying that “comics” is not a genre, just as film is not a genre.
Comics is an art form or perhaps a medium. But I will agree with the reviewer that Bechdel
manages to push it in new directions.) She received a lot of recognition for that feat, with Fun
Home being selected as a “Best Book of the Year” by Entertainment Weekly, the New York Times,
People, USA Today, Salon, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Village Voice, Time
Out New York, and the Advocate.
Fun Home was nominated for numerous prizes and won several of them. In the comics world,
the work was nominated for three Eisner Awards and received one. The Will Eisner Comic
Industry Awards are more or less equivalent to the Oscars for comics, and are awarded at
Comic-Con in San Diego each year. In 2007, Bechdel won the Eisner for Best Reality-Based

139.109 Unit Three: Study Guide 13

Work, with nominations for the categories Best Graphic Album-New and Best Writer/Artist.
With the French translation, the book was included in the official selection of the Angoulême
International Comics Festival, perhaps somewhat equivalent to a movie being part of the
Cannes film festival. Fun Home also received recognition beyond the comics world: It was a
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, in the memoir/autobiography category, and
received further literary attention in a manner hardly seen for a comic since Art Spiegelman’s
Maus, a graphic novel about his father’s experiences during the Holocaust, was awarded a
special Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Most of the laurels the work received came from the
LGBTQQI+ community. In 2007, Fun Home was awarded a Lambda Literary Award in the
“Lesbian Memoir and Biography” category, a Stonewall Book Award for nonfiction, a
Publishing Triangle-Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award, and a GLAAD Media Award for
Outstanding Comic Book. Much of this recognition was for the way Fun Home managed to
break through to and speak to non-LGBT audiences. Dykes to Watch Out For has remained a
cult favourite with a devoted queer readership, while Fun Home reached mainstream audiences
and gave them an honest and intimate look at the life of a lesbian with a closeted father.

Besides winning prizes and appearing on numerous best-of lists (for the year and the decade),
Fun Home also went on to have an impact in other ways. In 2013, an adaption of the work into
a stage musical made its off-Broadway debut at The Public Theatre, after having been
workshopped for several years. It made its Broadway debut in the following year. The musical
adaption also went on to be prizewinning and ground-breaking itself, winning numerous
awards for the Off-Broadway production, and winning five Tony Awards in 2015, including
Best Musical, out of twelve nominations. The musical Fun Home passed the Bechdel test
(obviously) but was also the very first musical to have both book and music written by women:
Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori. Bechdel wrote a strip in response to seeing the musical,
published in the magazine Seven Days. You can read it here:
[Link]
The Modern Language Association published the volume Approaches to Teaching Bechdel’s Fun
Home, edited by Judith Kegan Gardiner in 2018. Such a volume (part of the “Approaches to

139.109 Unit Three: Study Guide 14

Teaching World Literature” series) also shows how regularly this book gets adopted for teaching
in university courses. While the MLA has a volume called Teaching the Graphic Novel, the volume
on Bechdel is the only work in the series devoted to a single comic.
In 2014 Alison Bechdel was the recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, also known as
a “Genius Grant.” These awards are given out annually to 20-30 American citizens or residents
who are honoured for showing “extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits
and a marked capacity for self-direction” ([Link]). The fellowship consists of over
US$500,000, which the recipient can spend as they please over the course of five years. Bechdel
was only the second cartoonist ever to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, having been
preceded by Ben Katchor in 2000.
On a less positive note, Fun Home regularly appears on lists of the books that get the most
challenges at libraries, or requests for being removed. It holds a high spot on the 2015 list,
coming in at #7 for “Homosexuality, graphic images, nudity / Violence and other (‘graphic
images’).” The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom maintains this list
to help librarians deal with challenges. Fun Home particularly received a lot of attention when it
was chosen as the Duke University community read book in 2015, and first-year student Brian
Grasso very publicly objected to reading the book (interestingly, he did so not on the grounds of
homophobia per se, but because, in his view, “Jesus forbids his followers from exposing
themselves to anything pornographic,” which he clarifies as visual depictions—not written
depictions—of sexual acts. Quite whether the depictions of sex in Fun Home are “pornographic”
is a very debatable point.) The Comic Book Legal Defence Fund has a page dedicated to Fun
Home, to help comic shop owners and librarians who face challenges for the book:
[Link]
Fun Home is in good company in being both celebrated and challenged, joined, for example, by
James Joyce’s Ulysses, which, fittingly, is also the book Bechdel builds her final chapter around.
Luckily for us, Fun Home is much shorter and easier to read than Ulysses, and I hope that you
haven’t just accepted the hype about the work—good or bad—but have read it for yourself and
decided what you think. There will be an essay assignment which allows you to focus on Fun
Home, so if you have thoughts about the graphic novel, you will be able to work those into an
essay. I have cited a number of articles on Bechdel and Fun Home in this Study Guide, all
included in the references below, along with other references. Feel free to use these secondary
sources in your essays, since they should prove quite useful. I would particularly recommend
reading Judith Kegan Gardiner’s article “Queering Genre,” since besides providing a very
interesting reading of Bechdel’s work, it also provides a very useful model for an argument in
essay form and shows how a good title can capture an essay’s main point perfectly”

From Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? (2012)

139.109 Unit Three: Study Guide 15

Bibliography

Barounis, Cynthia. “Alison Bechdel and Crip-Feminist Autobiography.” Journal of Modern

Literature, vol. 39, no. 4 (2016), pp. 139-161.
Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. Cambridge UP, 2015.
Bauer, Heike. “Vital Lines Drawn From Books: Difficult Feelings in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home
and Are You My Mother?” Journal of Lesbian Studies, vol. 18, no. 3 (2014), pp. 266-281.
Bechdel, Alison. Are You My Mother? Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
---. The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008.
---. Fun Home. Mariner / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006.
---. Interview with Hélène Tison. GRAAT, vol. 1 (2007), n.p.:
[Link]
---. Interview with Hillary L. Chute. Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 52, no. 4 (2006), pp. 1004-1013.
---. Interview with Lynn Emmert. The Comics Journal, vol. 282 (2007): [Link]
alison-bechdel-interview/.
---. Interview with Marny Hall. Journal of Lesbian Studies, vol. 5, no. 3 (2001), pp. 15-21.
---. “Public Conversation: Alison Bechdel and Hillary Chute.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 40, no. 3
(2014), pp. 203-219.
Bellafante, Ginia. “Twenty Years Later, the Walls Still Talk.” New York Times, August 3, 2006:
[Link]
Chaney, Michael. Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Wisconsin UP,
2011.
Chute, Hillary L. “Decoding Comics.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 52, no. 4 (2006), pp. 1014-782.
---. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. Columbia UP, 2010.
---. Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. Harper, 2017.
Chute, Hillary L., and Marianne DeKoven. “Introduction: Graphic Narrative.” Modern Fiction
Studies, vol. 52, no. 4 (2006), pp. 767-782.
Cvetkovich, Ann. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Women’s Studies
Quarterly, vol. 36, nos. 1-2 (2008), pp. 111-128.
Freedman, Ariela. “Drawing on Modernism in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Journal of Modern
Literature, vol. 32, no. 4 (2009), pp. 125-140.
Galvan, Margaret. “‘The Lesbian Norman Rockwell’: Alison Bechdel and Queer Grassroots
Networks.” American Literature, vol. 90, no. 2 (2018), pp. 407-438.
Gangemi, Merry. “Review: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Off Our Backs, vol. 37, nos. 2-3
(2006), pp. 70-1.
Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford UP,
2012.
Gardiner, Judith Kegan. “Queering Genre: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For.” Contemporary Women’s Writing, vol. 5, no. 3 (2011),
pp. 188-207.
Kunka, Andrew. Autobiographical Comics. Bloomsbury, 2018.
Lemberg, Jennifer. “Closing the Gap in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Women’s Studies Quarterly,
vol. 36, nos. 1-2 (2008), pp. 129-140.
Lydenberg, Robin. “Reading Lessons in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.” College
Literature, vol. 44, no. 2 (2017), pp. 133-65.
Martin, Rachel R, ed. Alison Bechdel: Conversations. Mississippi UP, 2018.
McBean, Sam. “Seeing in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Camera Obscura, vol. 28, no. 3 (2013), pp.
103-123.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. HarperPerennial, 1993.
Miller, Michelle. “‘Whatever Else May Be Going On:’ Sharing Books in Bechdel’s Fun
Home.” Changing English, vol. 26, no. 4 (2019), pp. 405-14.

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Mitchell, Adrielle. “Spectral Memory, Sexuality and Inversion: An Arthrological Study of Alison
Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, vol. 4,
no. 1 (2009), n.p.: [Link]
Pearl, Monica B. “Graphic Language: Redrawing the Family (Romance) in Alison Bechdel’s Fun
Home.” Prose Studies, vol. 30, no. 3 (2008), pp. 286-304.
Pierce, Todd James, and Ryan G. Van Cleave, eds. Visual Storytelling: An Illustrated Reader. Oxford
UP, 2015.
Rohy, Valerie. “In the Queer Archive: Fun Home.” GLQ, vol. 16, no. 3 (2010), pp. 341-361.
Selisker, Scott. “The Bechdel Test and the Social Form of Character Networks.” New Literary
History, vol. 46, no. 3 (2015), pp. 505-523.
Simon, Margaret. “Collective Reading and Communities of Practice: Teaching Alison Bechdel’s
Fun Home.” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, vol. 26, no. 2,
(2016), pp. 139-56.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. Pantheon, 1996.
Tabachnick, Stephen E., ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel. Cambridge UP, 2017.
Thurman, Judith. “Drawn From Life: The World of Alison Bechdel.” The New Yorker, April 23,
2012: [Link]
Watson, Julia. “Autobiographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun
Home.” Biography, vol. 31, no. 1 (2008), pp. 27-58.
---. “The Pleasures of Reading in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Life Writing, vo. 9, no. 3 (2012),
pp. 303-314.
Warhol, Robyn. “The Space Between: A Narrative Approach to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.”
College Literature, vol. 38, no. 3 (2011), pp. 1-20.

139.109 Unit Three: Study Guide 17