Rereading Fun Home

Normally, I have a hard time getting through a book more than once without losing interest or skipping around to my favorite parts. Even when rereading some of my all time favorite novels I’ll frequently find myself skimming through slower segments of the story or catch myself mindlessly scanning the pages without actually taking anything in. This was surprisingly not the case when for some indiscernible reason I decided to reread Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home twice more over Spring Break. 

The best part of rereading a book is always drawing connections that were impossible to make during your initial reading thanks to critical puzzle pieces of information being absent until later in the story. This is especially true in the case of graphic novels since their imagery adds much more for the reader to unpack. Fun Home is no exception. My favorite example of this is one I immediately noticed upon my rereading on the first panel of page 15. While Alison begins to lay out some metaphors to give the reader a better understanding of her relationship with Bruce, we see her playing with a (probably model) gun while her father reads Kenneth Clark’s The Nude. At this point in the novel, the reader has no reason to believe Bruce is homosexual and so I merely wrote it off as him reading Clark’s work for purely architectural reasons. However, as we now all know, Alison’s father is in fact into men and while it is still somewhat feasible for his book choice to be purely innocent, I find that possibility quite unlikely for a couple reasons. First off, towards the end of the novel Alison points out just how calculated her father was in the books he recommended to her and I’d imagine either a) Bruce is equally deliberate in his book choice here or b) Alison is equally conscious in the book she chooses to depict him with in her novel. Second, it is very quickly made clear to the reader just how dead set Bruce is on carrying out every idea he has for the house’s decoration without fail and unless I’m just completely blind and missed it (which is admittedly fairly likely in my case), a sculpture of the sort never finds its way to the Bechdel home. Lastly, a few times towards the end of the story Alison mentions how the uncomfortable call from her mother that revealed her father had relations with other men helps her finally understand pieces of her fathers life and the childhood she spent with him. I think it would make a whole hell of a lotta sense if Bechdel intentionally ordered the story so that the reader would have the chance to reflect back on events such as this panel with a newfound understanding alongside our narrator. Again, it’s entirely possible Clark’s work is an entirely innocent book choice for Bruce, but even if it is, Bechdel’s writing and the peculiar order of presenting information made for a lovely bit of room for interpretation that my dull mind thoroughly enjoyed wandering around in. 

Thanks for reading my abominable blog post. Have a nice day. Or don’t. I can’t tell you what to do, I’m (probably) not your father.