"Fun" Home

 Hey everyone! 

    Today I will talk about Fun Home and Alison's interesting relationship with her father, Bruce. Throughout the book, we slowly learn more and more about their relationship, their interactions, their similarities, and their differences. However, the book is not narrated in a chronological way which can make stitching together when the interactions between them more difficult at times. It can also make it more difficult to keep track of when different people know or have done what. The relationship that Alison has with her father is very complicated for a lot of reasons. They are very similar to each other in a lot of ways, yet still almost complete opposites. They are both gay, at least from what we can tell of Bruce, and they both have had many similar experiences in this matter. However, the way that they handled it and viewed it was much different. 

     Alison, on the other hand, grew up in a much different and more accepting time. She discovered herself quite by accident intellectually and went from there. Her view of sexuality and being gay was heavily influenced by the fact that she read many books on the subject. In fact, this is the way that she discovered it in the first place, which made it very significant to her. Throughout her time at college, she reads tons of books either intellectually about being gay, or novels including gay main characters. She does this so much that she even falls behind on her work for her classes. This is very similar to Bruce, but with a key difference. 

    Bruce grew up in a different time, which influenced his views on his own sexuality very strongly. He believes that being gay makes him a bad person and wishes for Alison to not follow his example. However, his experience with books was similar to Alison's in a way. He also found himself in books and began to pattern his life and letters he wrote to Alison's mother off of them. He drew such parallels between his life and the book that from Alison's narration it almost seems like he has lost a little grip on reality. Once when he was dating Alison's mother, he saw one of the "Butch" females of that time. He felt very jealous but also unsure whether or not he would be able or have the guts to pull that kind of a look off. His whole life, he has always felt that he wanted to be more feminine. This is similar to Alison who always wore boys' clothes yet at the same time the opposite.

   

    Another thing that the two of them have in common is their love of books. They both read and have read many books. The main difference is the type of books that they read. For Alison, the most common book are novels with gay main characters. However, for Bruce, his main experiences with novels were when he was a soldier and married to Alison's mother. He drew on these books in the letters that he wrote home to her mother, and began to believe that they were living out a similar story to the characters in the story. This highlights an important difference between Alison and Bruce: the ability to which they were able to grow and become what they felt on the inside.

    In some ways, Bruce is a perfect mirror image of Alison, however, he is also in some ways the complete opposite. It reminds me of a function and its inverse, the inverse is still the same function but flipped around to be the opposite. It feels like the best way to describe the relationship between the two characters. There are many examples of this relationship in the book, such as their binary opposite-ness, or how the books they read ended up having opposite effects on their sexuality. Overall, I found this a very interesting part of the book, because there are so many different connections to analyze.