Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Chapter 4 opens on an illustration of a photograph of Bruce as a child, wearing a women’s swimsuit.

The chapter beings with a renumeration of Bruce’s death, this time entertaining the idea that it was truly an accident. The truck driver who hit him reports that he jumped back “into the road as if he saw a snake” (89).

Alison writes about her father’s great love of flowers and gardening in contrast to her own childhood distain for them. She recalls lilacs as her father’s favorite flower and relates this to Marcel Proust’s In Remembrance of Things Past, wherein the narrator falls in love with a woman because she was indistinguishable from a lush garden of flowers. Alison goes on to describe Proust as a gay man in text boxes accompanying a sequence of the Bechdels greeting Roy the baby-sitter.

Alison states that she and her father were both “inverts” and “inversions of one another” (98). While young Alison wished to be masculine, her father imposed femininity upon her. Alison’s gender-nonconformity and her father’s sexuality resulted in their “shared reverence for masculine beauty” (99), a peaceful coalescence between them.

When Alison was eight years old, she, her father, her brothers, and Roy went on a vacation to the Jersey Shore.