Graphic Language

Abstract

Fun Home, the graphic memoir drawn and written by Alison Bechdel, is a book of paradoxes and juxtapositions – and not only those of visual and written text. For example, while the very title Fun Home points to and emphasizes its domesticity, we learn quickly that home is no home, and fun is not really fun. “Fun Home” is “funeral home,” the shorthand the family comes to use to refer to the family business. But the misnomer is indicative of other labels that suggest but do not fully reveal, or suggest one thing but mean another. The book is a representation of and investigation into the paradoxes of surface and substance, what is family and only a simulacrum of family, the decor of a house and the notion of home, the dress and the identity of a person, and, finally, tragedy and comedy, as reflected in the text's title, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.

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