Fun Home - An exploration

I was prompted into reading Fun Home by Sinduja (See below. Warning: plot spoilers in her review as well as mine). A tragicomic, in the same vein as Persepolis, Alison Bechdel uses the brevity of the format with great effect to explore her complex relationship with her father. I’ve come to believe that the Graphic novel is a powerful way to deal with difficult and emotionally overloaded subjects in an engaging, thought provoking way with the illustrations speaking a thousand words. I also enjoyed the thematic organization of the narrative instead of a strictly chronological one.

To me Fun Home, in many ways, illustrated how we often use childhood experiences to justify the way we turn out as adults (not an entirely unfounded argument) but the fact is causation is mostly retrospective. Bechdel for example, traces her obsession with keep her spaces spare to her father’s obsession with creating a Victorian home, a restoration project that lasted his lifetime.

I enjoyed how Alison describes the effect of growing up in a family that ran a funeral home and how this stunted her ability to express grief at her father’s demise.

Alison then muses about how we believe we will react to certain events in specific, stereotyped ways and how, when actually confronted by those situations we discover that our reactions are quite different – that we perhaps cannot shed those public tears and labour under a much more private coming to terms with.

Another part that struck me as particularly poignant was how she tried to claim some responsibility for her father’s death and holds on to guilt as a lasting bond. I was reminded of this particular portion again yesterday as I was watching No Reservations, one of my absolutely favourite movies, for the umpteenth time. There’s a scene in the movie where Zoe is found by Kate at her mother’s grave and Zoe tells Kate that she came there because she was afraid of forgetting her mother.

Through the journey of the graphic novel, Alison traces, one by one, the various things that bonded her with her father in both antagonistic and compassionate ways. From books to their aesthetic preferences to her sexual orientation, Alison finds the hand of her father in every aspect of her life and eventually realizes that she can understand that bond only to a certain extent through rational contemplation, and that perhaps, she depends on him far more than she knows or cares to admit.

Review also posted here.

Fun Home: A tragicomic

Fun home calls itself a 'Tragicomic', a justified name, because Alison in this book, tries to make sense of a heartwrenching tragedy called 'loss of a loved one'. For the most part, I thought Alison was objective and distant while trying to comprehend her father's death, with a wry underlying sense of humor, dark ironies, and obsessions which are best understood only in the face of a grave tragedy. Dark humor is no fun without the darkness, and the darker the better. I enjoyed her critical reconstruction of her childhood, and her identity as she grows out of her childhood, as she introspects about her relationship with her father. I don't know if her relationship with her father was complex, but her understanding of the same definitely was. 

What stays with me is that she and her father were 'inversions' of each other; completely polarised in their most fundamental beliefs; her father being a man, loved flowers, and was thought of as a 'sissy' by her. Her father, on the other hand thought she was too manly for a woman. The fact that they both flouted others' expectations of them, from their gender and yet, disapproved of each other, connects them on the deepest levels. It's almost like Alison wanted to be a man and feels her father is lucky to be a man, and yet does not seem to enjoy it and vice versa. Disconnected badly, and yet connected deeply, they are placed in a conflicting, a lifelong emotionally draining situation. 

Her father was a mess. That he was a closeted homosexual, and had discrete affairs with several of his students, was OCDish about flowers and restoring their Victorian house did have strong implications on Alison and her siblings. Alison implies that most of his obsesssions and dedications derive their roots from his conflicts in accepting himself and his sexual identity. Alison on the other hand, chooses to accept her homosexual identity openheartedly and is comfortable disclosing it to the world. But to be fair, she and her father were products of different times; and Morever, Alison had the advantage of seeing her father, his mistakes, and his right doings. I think Alison acknowledges this when she says in the end 'But he was there to catch me.'

Alison calls her father obsessive, but she is obsessive too. Not just about believing that even numbers were better than odd numbers, and such like from her childhood days, but even about understanding her father and dealing with loss. Who would otherwise draw parallels with Proust, Gatsby, Icarus and several others, counting days and pages and draw intimate connections out of the most mundane details? But I understand what she did, and I think her philosophical observations, and her literary parallels and explorations only help her understand the depth of her pain behind the loss. It was more difficult for her, because she always roamed around death, owing to the 'Fun home' (Stands for funeral home, that her father was the director of). She thought she would be prepared for death, but faces one of many life's evil surprises - that indeed she wasn't. So if she could skip the steps, 'Denial and Anger', what would she replace them with? All the suggested rules in the rule book for behavior or understanding that worked for others, don't work for her. This also reminded me of how I thought, so many of our unexplored emotions are defined by films, television and other forms or media that we are exposed to. Like whenever I imagined someone's death, I always thought I would 'cry' like the way an actress did in a movie, or if I had to be sexy, I would do that someone else did somewhere. Many times we behave and believe a certain emotion (especially the ones that we don't go through very often) needs to look and feel like this. Alison didn't have a choice, because she just couldn't act like anyone else, because her situation was distinctly different.

I loved her confusions and her making sense process, because when faced with something like death of a loved one, the amount of confusion we face is just boundless; It's like quicksand that sucks you deeper the more you try to get out. It's daunting to even think about, and the best reaction is to use the everlasting drug to any problem - escapade and procrastination. By reading this, I am inspired to enter a room I have locked within, and battle the cobwebs, and understand.

Alison had made up her mind that she was a lesbian even before she experimented, in the 'intellectual way'..I thought her coming to terms with her father's loss was similar too - A spiraling intellectual ladder, but she falls into his lap in the end. And acceptance blinds it all, like white light.