The Reality of Fun Home

 Fun Home stuck out to me (compared to the other books we've read) as eerily real. Even though The Bell Jar is an actual recollection of things that have happened, the fact that Alison Bechdel is just telling things as they are (no name changes or anything of the sort), made it so that I could empathize more easily. I read the story as if I were looking into the mind of someone I knew, because I subconsciously realized that this was a real-life story. These characters are real, unchanged, and raw. They once existed, and she is now telling us all about their personal stories. For me, this made it so much sadder, but it also resonated with me more. The fact that nothing about this story was fiction made me reflect and engage more with the novel. I was more interested, and it made me more willing to analyze it. It is literally a passage into the mind of a person.

The other way that the reality of the book affected me is in her experiences as a member of the LGBTQ+ community. Even though they were becoming more and more common, LGBT people during this time period were much more oppressed than today, and being a lesbian must have been quite hard. Her uses of real experiences made her story resonate with me much more; it showed me insight on how it was to come of age as a homosexual person in a time when it was very difficult. In other words, it made me empathize more with the main character, because I knew that it was all 100% real.

Comments

  1. Eliza D. TerzievApril 6, 2021 at 7:11 AM

    I completely agree that empathizing with this book was easier than with the others, and as well as the purely autobiographical nature of the book, I thought that its being a comic book helped as well. Her illustrations while overtly not an attempt at realism still managed to convey emotion through expressions, conveying nuance which I don't believe I would have been able to come up with on my own were I just reading the words. Good points!

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  2. RylandMay 1, 2021 at 5:34 PM

    Yeah the moment I realized that the name on the cover matched the name in the book I started thinking about things differently. It is a really different book than anything else we have read so far in both the medium and how real it is. That being said this has also been the most suspiciously tidy and interweaving coming of age we have read yet which makes me read this with a grain of salt.

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  3. MitchellMay 7, 2021 at 12:40 PM

    It is interesting that Bechdel depicts her own coming out--in the early 1980s, precisely the time when Jason is so worried that literally anything he says or does could be "gay," and when Benji and his friends throw the word "fag" around with reckless abandon--as relatively unproblematic and even easy for her. It's a largely private matter of coming to understand her own self and to see herself reflected in various historical and literary gay people, but she doesn't seem especially anxious about living openly as lesbian at her college or in the city more generally. In this book, it's her father who really has to try to survive as a gay man in the "dark ages," and Alison herself wonders aloud if she would have had the courage that lesbians who lived openly in the 1950s would have had. She is always aware, it seems, that her father faced a much more daunting prospect in coming out than she does.

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  4. Lauren L.May 14, 2021 at 3:30 PM

    i can definitely see how these aspects would make it more easy to sympathize, but it was actually the opposite for me. It was hard for me to understand alison's emotions and how she felt without her going into detail. I feel like normal coming of age novel's tend to be more stream of consciousness while hers was very planned out and intricate in its usage of metaphors, making it harder to digest and leaving more room for the imagination to wander and attempt to fill in the gaps

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