Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Chapter 1 opens on a splash page: a portrait of Bruce Bechdel—shirtless in front of his house, likely working in the garden. The portrait is black-and-white, crosshatched, and heavily detailed in contrast with the simple, cartoony, blue inked-washed comics.

Young Alison plays “airplane” with her father. In the captions, Bechdel identifies airplane as an “Icarian game” and compares her relationship with her father to that of the mythical father and son Daedalus and Icarus. She casts her father as Daedalus due to his skill as a craftsman. However, “[i]n our particular reenactment of this mythic relationship, it was not me but my father who was to plummet from the sky” (4).

Bruce abruptly ends the game of airplane to fix up the house. This is followed by a montage of Bruce’s efforts in historical restoration, with emphasis on his expertise, doggedness, and the deployment of his children as helpers. Bechdel characterizes him as emotionally withholding, blank-faced, temperamental, and intimidating. Despite his passion for home restoration, Bruce was a 12th-grade English teacher by trade.

The Bechdel home was a gothic revival house built in the mid-1800s. It had fallen into disrepair by the time Alison’s parents purchased it. Bruce obsessively restored the house with “dazzling displays of artfulness” (9).