From Fun Hom ALISON BECHDEL A Family Tragicomic LISON BECHDEL (b. 1960) was educ

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From Fun Hom ALISON BECHDEL A Family Tragicomic LISON BECHDEL (b. 1960) was educated at both Simon's Rock and Oberlin Colleges. Upon graduating in 1981, she moved to New York City with the intention of attending art school, but her applications were rejected. Bechdel's comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, first published in 1983 in the newspaper Womanneus, garnered enough success for Bechdel to become a full-time cartoonist in 1990. Her graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) recounts growing up with her parents, both of whom were school teachers and proprietors of a small-town funeral parlor. It addresses how Bechdel came to understand not only that she is gay, but also that her father was, too. Fun Home was named one of the ten best books of the year by Time magazine and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The term "graphic novel" was coined by Will Eisner in the 1970s as a way to describe his books, in which he explored his Jewish ethnicity in comic book format-a genre that had traditionally been associated with humor.In Fut Home, Bechdel employs this medium to depict a number of discoveries she made as she underwent the process of sorting out her and her father's sexual identities. Note how Bechdel uses the graphic novel medium and think about how effective that strategy is. How does it help her analyze the process of understanding and does it extend the definition of"graphic novel"? accepting one's identity? How Bechdei , Home 4 Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel. Copyright 2006 by Alison permission of Houghton Miflin Harcourt Publishing Companx ll From Fin reserved. 29

Explanation / Answer

Aliasing Bechdel’s graphic novel ‘Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic’ traces the authors own identity strifes with her sexual orientation in the form of a triptych where her own authorial present is in a constant dialogue with her past experiences and her father’s life. The narrative is constructed to keep the author’s focus forever on the present while ironically building the complexity within the story through a recourse to the personal histories of her own father and herself as the daughter. A self reflexive mode of writing allows her to reconstruct her own past memories of the camping trip as symbolic of a break from the everyday ordinary life of silences and lies and a rare opportunity for the emergence of a distraught sexuality which is marked in the episodic appearance of ‘revelations’ whether in the form of calendar images, or the illusionary snake. Her present consciousness as a queer author allows her reflect on the hidden and unshared similarities between herself and her father as they both seemed to hide their own trysts with their sexuality and come to a state where mutual communication is either marked by silence, ‘lies’ or sexuallyinnuendos and symbols. The key symbol of the text, that of the Proustian allegory of ‘Purdue’ allows us to engage with how the author construct such her own present identity as a self reflexive and nostalgic woman by looking at the lies and the losses that become imperative to relationships within the family such as that between her parents, and between his fathers past as an amorous young, perhaps a crossdressing man, and her own emerging sense of sexuality as a queer person.

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