FunHomeQuestions

1. What methods does Bechdel use to interrogate the past, and why? For example, her close examination of the
photo of Roy on pages 100-101.
2. Bechdel describes her own style as one of cool aesthetic distance (67). What does she mean by that? Do you
feel that is true about this memoir? After all, she does portray her own blood spattered on the page. . . .
3. Why does Bechdel engage with so many literary texts? Do you think she is using them as a language that enables
her expression? For example, are they metaphors? Are they a means to touch the reality of her parents?
4. Bechdel claims that there was something entirely fictional about the life her family led. What does she mean by
that?
5. Bechdel clings to the notion that her coming out caused her fathers suicide because that cause and effect
relationship provided a tenuous but real connection with him. What is at stake in that connection for her? Is this idea
consistently developed in the novel?
6. Fun Home includes numerous pages in which Bechdel has drawn a photograph or re-drawn pages from her
journals. Why do you suppose she chose to re-draw these instead of scanning them into the memoir?
7. There is much that Bechdel does not know about her own past. What is the form she uses to capture that
unknowingness?
8. On page 125, she wonders what would happen if everyone told the truth. Does she tell the truth in this memoir? If
her use of figures like Gatsby is an effort to tell the truth, why does she choose to tell the truth through these
metaphoric texts?
9. Do you think Bechdel uses Fun Home to draw her father closer to her?
10. In your opinion, what passage reveals something deep about this book?
11. Consider the distance between the interior voice of a knowing, reflective grown-up Bechdel, written in the firstperson, present-day text found in the captions, and the exterior image of a more naive, questioning youthful Alison,
depicted in the cartoon caricature of the panels. What is the difference for memoir between telling and showing in
these ways?
12. Bechdel seems to want to judge her father and to resist judging him, perhaps most notoriously on page 100
(where she asks the question about whether she'd react to the picture of her father and Roy if the lover were a
teenage girl instead). What are the apparent limits of her investigation of her past, and her father's past? How does
she address or justify those limits?