We never found out the truth

    

    Throughout Fun Home, Alison Bechdel describes her dad in all kinds of ways, from abusive to someone who was misunderstood, to sometimes a loving father. While Bruce Bechdel had his ups and downs, I think he was someone no one can fully understand because we never got his firsthand account. His death is strongly hinted to be suicide but even that we are never sure about. Bruce Bechdel was a man struggling with his own identity but he did his best to give his family a stable life.

    Bruce was a closeted man and his kids didn't come to fully realize what their father had been facing until after his death. Before that he kept everything to himself and that takes a lot out of a person. At the beginning of the novel Alison believes her mom asking for a divorce is what caused Bruce to take his own life. He is often shown as this controlling figure who instilled fear in Alison and her brothers. Alison says "I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture" (Bechdel 14). While that quote doesn't show Bruce in the best light it does reveal a lot about who he was and how he coped with the reality he was living in as a closeted man conforming to social norms. For Bruce, the order and structure of his home might have been the one place he felt in control, a place where he could channel his energy and express himself without ever having to explain who he was.

    His temper was probably just another way of coping. It is so hard to be fake in your own house, to put a smile on your face and pretend everything is fine just to keep the peace when you are carrying all of these secrets inside and not being able to live the life you want. Alison also writes that her dad "used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not" (Bechdel 16). That description captures the core of who Bruce was, a man so consumed by appearances that even the way he decorated and restored his home became a kind of performance, a way of projecting the perfect life he wanted people to see rather than the one he was actually living. Alison does bring up her father's softer moments later in the novel and those glimpses show Bruce was not just one thing. He was not simply the cold, controlling man Alison describes early on, but someone who also had warmth in him, even if it did not always come through the way it should have. That contradiction is part of what makes him so hard to define and honestly that is just how parents are. You can hate them and love them at the same time and at the end of the day everyone is just trying to get through it.

    What got me by the end of the novel is how Alison spends so much of the book feeling like she is nothing like her father but you cannot help but see how similar they really are. Alison says "I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy" (Bechdel 58) and honestly is that not just growing up. Your story starts inside someone else's and your trauma gets mixed up with theirs whether you want it to or not. Bruce chose to keep his sexuality hidden his whole life even when his wife already knew and we never get to find out why. I feel for the guy. Living in that kind of silence while trying to hold a whole family together is its own kind of tragedy. The truth is we will never fully understand Bruce Bechdel but maybe that is the point, and maybe that uncertainty is what leads Alison to the conclusions she draws about her father's death and the life he lived.