Question 1

What is the "Fun Home" of the title?

Accepted Answer

The 'Fun Home' of the title is the Bechdel family's nickname for Bechdel's Funeral Home — the family home in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, was connected to the funeral parlor that Bruce Bechdel ran as part of his income, and the family children called it the 'fun home' with the irony that children deploy when they have been living with death. The title announces the memoir's central tone: the ironic, recursive, deeply literary investigation of a family life that was both privileged and claustrophobic, both loving and deeply strange. Bruce Bechdel's obsessive restoration of the Victorian house — he was a high school English teacher and a man of serious aesthetic ambition — is the memoir's central metaphor: he was building a beautiful exterior around a life that was secretly in crisis; Bechdel's memoir is the excavation of what that beautiful exterior was covering.

Question 2

How does Fun Home use literary references?

Accepted Answer

Fun Home is one of the most densely and explicitly literary graphic memoirs ever written: Bechdel organizes each chapter around a literary work that she uses as a framework for understanding her family's experience — Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Joyce's Ulysses, Colette's Earthly Paradise, Camus's The Stranger, and Ring Lardner's story 'Sun Also Rises.' These references are not decorative; they are the memoir's method. Bechdel's father was a literary man (an English teacher, a devotee of Henry James and Fitzgerald), and the memoir argues that the literary works he loved and used in his teaching were also the coded language through which he expressed an inner life he could not express directly. Bechdel uses the same literary works to decode her father: reading what he read, as he must have read it, in order to understand what he was actually saying. The memoir is therefore simultaneously a daughter's investigation of her father and a reader's investigation of how literature functions as a medium for the expression of lives that cannot be spoken directly.

Question 3

Is Fun Home appropriate for young readers?

Accepted Answer

Fun Home has been one of the most frequently challenged books in American schools and libraries since it began to be adopted by university curricula and some high school programs in the late 2000s and 2010s. The challenges typically center on several categories of content: the memoir's explicit discussion and occasional depiction of homosexuality (both Bechdel's own coming out as a lesbian and her father's secret homosexual life), some sexually explicit imagery (a brief sequence depicting gay pornography that Bechdel finds), and its discussion of suicide. Proponents of the memoir argue that these subjects are handled with literary seriousness and that the memoir's investigation of sexuality, identity, and family is exactly the kind of content that young people need to encounter in educational contexts. The memoir is widely taught in college courses and some high school AP courses; it was adapted as a Broadway musical that won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015. Whether it is appropriate for younger readers depends on the educational context and the maturity of the readers; the challenges it has received are a reflection of the ongoing culture war over LGBTQ content in schools rather than a reflection of any lack of literary seriousness in the work itself.

Fun Home Reading Order

Complete Fun Home Book List

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama

Fun Home — Frequently Asked Questions

What is the "Fun Home" of the title?

How does Fun Home use literary references?

Is Fun Home appropriate for young readers?

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