Reality and Fiction

The most striking image of the first half of "Fun Home" occurs on page 120. Panel two juxtaposes two very similar photographs. The first photo (the one on the left) portrays a young Bruce lounging in the sun in his early twenties, while the second photo is of a young Alison also in her early twenties. She wonders, "Was the boy who took it his lover? As the girl who took this Polaroid of me on a fire escape on my twenty-first birthday was mine?" (p.120). She goes on to highlight the similarities between the two pictures: the shadows dancing across their faces, their "pained grin[s]," and even the similar exterior settings. What is most interesting about this is the inclusion of the picture of her father (Bruce) dressed as a woman. However, her father looks nothing like a man in this picture, halfway tucked behind the two prominent images in the frame. Instead, he looks like a beautiful young woman, just as Alison looks like a handsome young man.

Panel two best represents the dualities that exist throughout the text. At times Alison brings particular attention to these "diametrically opposed" dualities (p.101). These are: femininity and masculinity, homosexuality and heterosexuality, and most prominently, reality and fiction.

Throughout the first half of the graphic novel memoir, Alison is not only trying to understand herself in terms of her father's mysterious double life, but also trying to come to terms with these many dualities that are maybe not so "diametrically opposed" (p.101). It seems that in the first half these definitions that she assigns to aspects of her life are not so clear-cut. For example, doesn't the memoir demand us to ask ourselves if there is really a huge difference between reality and fiction/art? Moreover, by writing about her struggle with identity and self in such a way (the graphic novel form) isn't she blurring the lines between reality and art? Alison explains, "my parents are most real to me in fictional terms" (p.67), as if this whole work was her way of finding a common ground between these dualities of reality and fiction. Alison even goes so far as to describe her mother's life in terms of Henry James's Catherine Sloper and Shakespeare's shrew, Katherine (p. 66 and 69). Again on page 83, after her mother reads Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," Alice comments: "perhaps she also liked the poem because its juxtaposition of catastrophe with a plush domestic interior is life with my father in a nutshell."

The most prevalent duality in the text (besides the hidden/known duality concerning her father's life) is that of reality and fiction. Here Alison has a difficult time separating the two. I think that the text, like Alison, is forcing us to ask some questions. Are fact (reality) and fiction (art) really all that different? Is it simpler? More complex? Can we better understand and make sense of our own reality through fiction and art?