Allison Bechdel's Fun Home

In her graphic memoir Fun Home, Allison Bechdel puts forth the experience of shared homosexuality as the major connection that binds her to her father, concluding her meandering analysis of the man and his relationship to her with a chapter centered around an episode in which they both acknowledge their queerness. This connection is absolutely a valid one. However, in framing this episode as the culminating event in the father/daughter relationship Fun Home portrays, Bechdel fails to offer overt acknowledgment of the ways in which her text supports alternate readings of this dynamic: namely that both Alison and Bruce share the common affliction of mental illness and a common need for control. Bechdel's decision not to emphasize a connection

The Obsessive Compulsive Symptoms (OCS) that she manifests during 1971 are clearly meant to tie symbolically into the feelings of uncertainty, locational constraint, and impending collapse that permeate Chapters 5 and 6, where they accompany her father's confinement in the geographic space of Beech Creek, her family's “autistic” nature, her mother's stressful master's thesis, her father's arrest, the unfolding Watergate scandal, and a storm that fells several trees around her family's house. However, amidst all these interlinked elements she never directly links her own psychiatric issues to those of her father as he consults with his court ordered psychiatrist. This would have been an easy connection to make, as both her episodes and his psychotherapy occur in close proximity to one another in Fun Home's free-associated narration. Her decision not to highlight these parallel experiences has much to do, no doubt, with the historical framing of her father's mental illness. It is clear that Bechdel believes or has believed her father to have been mentally ill in some capacity, given her imagined outburst at his funeral in which she refers to him as a “manic-depressive, closeted fag” (Bechdel 125). However, the circumstances surrounding Bruce Bechdel's experiences with a psychologist inextricably link any