Prior to its publication, Bechdel was best known for her long-running cult comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, which followed a series of diverse characters between 1983 and 2008. (including. In some ways, the two became closer. Fun Home Synopsis - Broadway musical Intricate plot, in which several storylines are interwoven that are created by the same people, only at different times of their life and age. This was the first adult graphic novel I’ve read. The title's "fun home" refers to the family funeral parlour where her father worked and is an appropriate setting for Bechdel's investigation of loss and grief. Fun Home Quotes Showing 1-30 of 31 “I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Adapted from Alison Bechdel's groundbreaking graphic novel, Fun Home is a refreshingly honest, wholly original musical about seeing your parents through grown-up eyes. Alison recounts a time when Bruce took Alison and her brothers to New York for the bicentennial of the United States. She is shocked to learn that Bruce was engaged in sexual relationships with his gardener and the children's babysitter, and that her mother has always been aware of his infidelity. The memoir starts with Alison as a young girl, playing with her father, who she compares to both Daedalus, the genius inventor of Greek myth, and Icarus, Daedulus’s son who flew too close to the sun on wings designed by his father and plummeted to his death. Shimmering with a Proustian glow, “Fun Home” is an investigation into the history of a fascinatingly eccentric and profoundly troubled family. Bechdel builds the narrative around the tragic event of her father's death. It chronicles the author's childhood and youth in rural Pennsylvania , United States, focusing on her complex relationship with her father. One time before her father’s death when she returned home from college, Alison tries to connect with her father about being gay. She comes out at as a lesbian at the age of 19, while she is in college. The graphic memoir Fun Home starts with the adult Alison Bechdel narrating over images of her childhood. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel tracing her journey from young girl to young adult as she comes to grips with her own lesbian sexuality, her father Bruce’s (most likely) suicide, and his secret homosexuality or bisexuality that he kept hidden throughout his life while having affairs with underage boys. I think Alison Bechdel always carries a Swiss Army knife. Later, while standing over Bruce’s grave, Alison has trouble believing her father is really down there, though she knows deep down that he’s “stuck in the mud…” permanently. One strip from the series titled ‘The Rule’ coined the Bechdel Test in popular culture, which critiques Hollywood … Alison notes how books were just as important to Bruce’s intellectual development as her own, and she delves into his youthful obsession with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Michel Foucault’s “Repressive Hypothesis”, Suspension of the Imaginary in the Real: Fiction as Truth in the Memoir. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Alison narrates that Icarus—and Bruce—did hurtle into the sea, but Bruce “was there to catch” Alison when she leapt. As a teenager, Alison was reluctant to bond with Bruce, but when she became a student in his high school English class, the two ended up bonding over an interest in literature. However, Alison eventually enrolled in a semester-long course on Bruce’s favorite book, Ulysses, and she uses that book and Homer’s Odyssey as a reference while narrating her own sexual quest towards fulfillment and understanding. It focuses specifically on her parents, Helen and Bruce, and their role in her life. Young Alison Bechdel lives in Pennsylvania with Helen, Bruce, and her little brothers Christian and John. Alison wonders what might have happened if Bruce had been able to escape Beech Creek and live someplace else. The cast recording of the Tony-award winning musical, Fun Home is based on the graphic memoir of the same name by Alison Bechdel. This proved to be a chaotic summer in the Bechdel household: all at the same time, Helen was working on her Master’s thesis and playing Lady Bracknell in a local production of The Importance of Being Earnest; Alison got her first period and decided to keep it a secret; Beech Creek was swamped with a horde of seventeen-year-cicadas; and, nationally, the Nixon/Watergate scandal was coming to a head. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel. The Bechdels are unhappy in … It has won several award and was nominated for 2007 Eisner Awards. Fun Home switches tone elegantly and yet swiftly, the comical and the dramatic yielding a solid realism. "Fun Home Summary". Alison notes that when Bruce was in the army during World War II he got stationed in Europe. “Fun Home commercial take seven-million-billion-thousand” –Christian “Throughout the score, you can hear the influence of the 60s and 70s that both Bechdel and Tesori grew up in. My students love how organized the handouts are and enjoy tracking the themes as a class.”. As Alison grows older and realizes that she is a lesbian, she and Bruce are both forced to confront how his repression may have affected her own self-image and the way that she dealt with her sexuality. Alison then narrates an impactful incident when Bruce took the kids as well as his young helper (and presumably lover) Roy on a trip up to the family cabin. That night, Bruce went off into the city by himself while the kids slept. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a graphic novel memoir by American cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Four months before, after realizing she was a lesbian by reading about homosexuals in a library book, Alison had written her parents a letter in which she came out. Alison gives a brief biography of her father, noting that he was born, lived, died, and was buried all within a two-mile radius in the town of Beech Creek, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Joan Marcus “In some ways, it [the new information] would have made it a less interesting book. Eventually, everything worked out: Bruce didn’t have to go to jail and only had to see a therapist for six months (who he may have later slept with), the play was well received, Helen’s thesis was accepted, Nixon resigned, and Alison finally told Helen about her period. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.” ― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic It focuses specifically on her parents, Helen and Bruce, and their role in her life. Alison then delves into the details surrounding Bruce’s death—though there’s no concrete proof that he killed himself, the circumstances preceding the incident (like Alison coming out as a lesbian a few months earlier as well as Helen, Alison’s mother, filing for a divorce just two weeks before his death) make Alison relatively certain his death was a suicide. Alison Bechdel's father Bruce was an enigma to her while she was growing up—an English teacher and director of the family-owned funeral home (aka the "Fun Home") who had an exacting eye for fashion, decor, and gardening. Alison details Bruce’s obsession with restoring the family’s old Gothic Revival house, which Alison believes was largely motivated by his desire to keep up the appearance of being a good Christian family man even as he was also secretly sleeping with some of his male teenage students. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel. Upon their return to the U.S., Bruce inherited the Bechdel family-run funeral home. As a kid, Alison viewed her father as a “sissy” and sought to fill in for the masculine presence she felt her family was missing. who is the person who always carries a knife. They're like having in-class notes for every discussion!”, “This is absolutely THE best teacher resource I have ever purchased. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Fun Home Summary and Analysis Buy From Amazon. The main characters of this sequential art, graphic novels story are , . Later though, when Alison was at college, Bruce’s overbearing interest in her classes lead Alison to swear off English permanently. He wasn't a bad father, but he always seemed to keep her and her brothers at arm's length, not to mention her mother. At the beginning, Alison is a child, playing with her father, Bruce, by being lifted into the air on his feet. Alison discusses the evolution of her O.C.D., which entered her diary first in the form of self-doubt, such that she would write, “I think” between each declarative statement. Fun Home - Chapters 1 – 2 Summary & Analysis Alison Bechdel This Study Guide consists of approximately 31 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Fun Home. They buy a charming fixer-upper which her father lovingly devotes much of his spare time to restoring to grandeur often enlisting Alison for assistance. As she works on her memoir in the present day, successful middle-aged cartoonist Alison Bechdel (Alison) recalls two time periods in her life. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Alison wonders what would have happened if Bruce hadn’t died in 1980. It then got so bad that she would scribble “I think” over each entry, causing Helen to take Alison’s diary away until Alison decided to break her compulsions, which she eventually did. Alison then delves into the publication history of Ulysses, which was supported by three lesbian women who ended up seeing none of the profits. Alison also compares Bruce to Marcel Proust in the way they intermingled their lives with fiction in order to conceal their homosexual proclivities, as well as their mutual obsession with the beauty of flowers. Alison comes to understand many things about her father, and her... in a graphic memoir, the images are as important as the words. As a result, Fun Home follows Bechdel's journey as she tries to unpack and understand the depth of Bruce's closeted life and his motivations, especially as they relate to her own. The Question and Answer section for Fun Home is a great As kids, Alison and her brothers had to do chores in the funeral home, which they nicknamed the “Fun Home.” As the nickname implies, their interaction with the Fun Home gave them a desensitized and often “cavalier” attitude towards death. Later, in a similar incident, Alison was drawing in a coloring book when Bruce got upset that she was using the wrong color, causing him to take over and shade it in for her. Fun Home song list including song titles, associated characters and recommended audition songs. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. In Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, … Join StageAgent today and unlock amazing theatre resources and opportunities. Big … Fun home is what she and her brothers called the family-owned funeral home her dad ran. As an adult, Alison learns that when she was thirteen Bruce’s secret almost surfaced when he offered a young boy a beer while searching for the boy’s older brother who was (most likely) Bruce’s lover. On the way to a movie, Bruce is honest with Alison about dressing in girls’ clothes and wanting to be a girl as a young boy, and Alison reminds him about how she used to dress like a boy. Also, Alison notes that her diary entries became more and more untrustworthy, until she eventually stopped writing in it at all. She laments that he died before she could properly speak to him about his sexuality and his subsequent shame. Alison remembers that, as a young girl, Bruce’s return home always signaled the end of her fun time with Helen and Christian. Bruce's volatile moods fill the Bechdels' home with uncertainty and tension. Fun Home essays are academic essays for citation. Learn The house, then, felt to Alison like an artists’ colony, with each member of the family compulsively absorbed in his or her own pursuits. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of. Struggling with distance learning? Described by The Times of London as "a profound and important book" Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is an autobiographical graphic novel by American comic writer and artist Alison Bechdel.First published in 2006, this graphic novel has received highly positive acclaim from critics. Soon after coming out, Alison learns from her mother that Bruce has always carried on affairs with men and boys. It is important to note that what Alison and her father are doing in this scene is role-playing. Alison notes that she and her father were close, but “not close enough,” and they never discussed their sexuality again before Bruce’s death. Not affiliated with Harvard College. The weekend turned out to be “gay” all around: the family went to the ballet, saw homosexuals in Greenwich Village, and went to see the musical A Chorus Line. Free download or read online Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic pdf (ePUB) book. what do you learn from bechdel's image that you might not have picked up from her words? There, he courted Helen by exchanging letters with her. Summary Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home travels substantially through time. Alison notes that this is when she decided to come out of the closet to her parents, which caused Helen in response to tell her the secret of Bruce’s affairs and sexuality. Bechdel suspects that her father's death was a suicide, highlighting several specific facts and incidents as evidence. Her family owns a funeral home in a small town so her father works as an English teacher, her mother an actress. As a child, Bechdel always … Boghani, A. ed. Not too long after Alison's revelation, Helen tells her daughter that she has asked Bruce for a divorce. The second is her first year in college (Medium Alison), when she begins her first relationship and comes out of the closet as a lesbian. Thus, Bruce and Alison constantly engaged in “a war of cross-purposes,” where Alison tried to express her masculinity through Bruce and Bruce tried to express his femininity through Alison. Later, Alison discovers a photograph from this trip that Bruce had clearly taken of Roy, shirtless, lying in bed, which she examines closely. After the movie, Bruce tries to take Alison to a gay bar, but they aren’t allowed in because Alison is underage. Teachers and parents! At Bruce’s funeral, Alison becomes irritable and wishes she could speak the truth about Bruce’s death, but instead keeps quiet. "Fun Home" is an entertaining and poignant autobiography of Bechdel's childhood. Shortly before Bruce’s death, Alison narrates that she had an eerie dream in which the two of them try to view a sunset but Bruce, lagging behind, misses it. Fun Home (subtitled A Family Tragicomic) is a 2006 graphic memoir by the American writer Alison Bechdel. The Tony Award-winning musical Fun Home traces the coming-of-age of lesbian author Alison Bechdel, from her youth, to her years at Oberlin College, and finally to the present, where Alison, now grown, is struggling to write her own graphic autobiography. Meanwhile, his relationship with his children and his wife is frosty and sometimes violent. One of the most groundbreaking productions ever to hit Broadway, Fun Home is the winner of five 2015 Tony Awards including Best Musical. Note: * It may be that the problems with the opening mythic allusion of the Icarus/Daedalus relationship coloured the remainder of my reading of Bechdel’s graphic memoir. At the same time, Bechdel makes a connection between them playing airplane and the myth of Icarus and Daedalus. “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” is a graphic memoir (a work of nonfiction told in pictures) by Alison Bechdel which recounts her coming out as a lesbian, her father’s repressed bisexuality, and the relationship between Bechdel and her father. This is an example of Bechdel using certain words with multiple applicable meanings. Bruce and Helen had been living in Europe, but the death of Bruce's father forced them to return stateside to take over the Bechdels' funeral home business (which is the inspiration for the memoir's title). However, Bruce ends up confessing more about his feelings and sexuality than Alison does, so Alison ends up feeling like she is the parent during the exchange. The graphic novel Fun Home by Alison Bechdel opens with a series of panels portraying how she and her father used to play airplane. Two weeks later, Bruce Bechdel is dead, having been hit by a Sunbeam Bread truck while crossing the street. Bruce meticulously cares for and improves upon the family's old Gothic revival mansion. The first is her childhood, around age 10 (Small Alison), when she struggles against her father Bruce's obsessive demands and begins to identify her inchoate sexuality. She discusses the landscape around Beech Creek, which is both naturally beautiful and industrially polluted. Meghan Joyce Tozer. But "Fun Home" quietly succeeds in telling a story, not only through well-crafted images but through words that are equally revealing and well chosen. Alison then reveals that Bruce killed himself while she was in college, and though he lived through most of her childhood, she and the rest of the family felt his absence long before he was physically gone. Fun Home Quotes and Analysis "My father's death was a queer business - queer in every sense of that multi-valent word." Shortly after this time, Alison and her brother Christian were born, and Bruce and Helen purchased the Gothic Revival house. Instant downloads of all 1383 LitChart PDFs Copyright © 1999 - 2020 GradeSaver LLC. Her father's death is queer because he had been secretly queer - at least to her - until just before his death. As a young girl, Alison decided to write a poem about nature, and Bruce added a stanza onto it. Fun Home is a hard book, but—filled with love and hate and glory and discontent and tragedy and hope—it’s also a powerful one. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. The first edition of the novel was published in June 8th 2006, and was written by Alison Bechdel. Alison’s mother Helen was equally obsessive in her own artistic pursuits, which mostly concerned her acting in community theater plays. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel tracing her journey from young girl to young adult as she comes to grips with her own lesbian sexuality, her father Bruce ’s (most likely) suicide, and his secret homosexuality or bisexuality that he kept hidden throughout his life while having affairs with underage boys. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a 2006 graphic memoir by the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, author of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. I was really surprised how drawn into it I was. Fun Home is Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir of her life growing up. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a memoir about Bechdel's family that deals with, among other subjects, her sexual orientation as well as that of her father, a closeted funeral home … The book was published in multiple languages including English, consists of 232 pages and is available in Paperback format. 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