Nicknamed the ‘Fun Home’, Bechdel remembers enjoying herself there, watching her father prepare cadavers for burial each time there was a death in the town. While fixing up the house was her father’s passion, he also worked as a high school English teacher and as a part-time mortician in the funeral home he inherited from Bechdel’s grandparents. Bechdel remembers her father’s impatience, how quick he was to lash out in punishment, and how insecure he felt about his appearance – something he attempted to cover up by throwing himself into the restoration of an old mansion in which they all lived. Throughout the novel, Bechdel works through her difficult childhood relationship with her father, Bruce, and her gradual discovery that he, too, harboured secrets from Bechdel, her mother and siblings. Told in non-chronological flashbacks to her childhood in Beech Creek, a small rural town tucked into the Allegheny Mountains, Pennsylvania, the story is also a way of Bechdel making sense of her father’s death by comparing his life to her own.

Subtitled ‘A Family Tragicomic’, Fun Home is a graphic novel recounting the story of Alison Bechdel coming out as a lesbian. In this video explainer, Matt Draper considers how stories provide metaphors and archetypes to help people better understand their lives, through a discussion of literary allusions in Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home.

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