‘Whatever Else May Be Going On:’ Sharing Books in Bechdel’s Fun Home

ABSTRACT

In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel recounts a version of her family’s history through moments of meaningful textual exchange. This paper takes up one such moment, when Alison’s father Bruce offers his daughter a queer text, which she uses both to understand her own sexuality and to broach the the queer connection she has just learned they have. I read this exchange as a case study for considering what happens when we share our meaningful books with others. Here I map the way literary works function in this text both developmentally, following Grumet’s reading of Winnicott, and erotically, following Bechdel’s own narration. I read the act of sharing books as an act of love that helps build the world worth noticing, core relationships, and individual identities, reading too how literature functions as ‘currency’ in the difficult father-daughter relationship at hand in this graphic memoir.

KEYWORDS:

• Fun Home
• Alison Bechdel
• queer family
• development
• literature
• graphic memoir

Acknowledgments

I am the sole author of this piece and I grant permission for the final version to be published.

The author is grateful for the careful readings of Drs. Jen Gilbert, Lisa Farley, Chloe Brushwood-Rose, Angela Robinson and Hannah Dyer, as well as the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michelle Miller

Michelle Miller is an Assistant Professor in English Literature at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, ON. Her work takes up representations of adolescence in contemporary coming of age comic books. Previous publications can be found in Girlhood Studies and English Studies in Canada.