Allison’s Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic narrative Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic bridges two different narrative forms, nonfiction and graphic narrative, in a manner that reveals how the combination creates something unique. As H. Porter Abbot discusses in Chapter Eleven of The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, most readers expect nonfiction narratives to be completely, or at least mostly, truthful, but is this same standard applied to non-fiction and/or autobiographical graphic narratives? According to some critics like Jared Gardner, autobiographical comics are not held to the same standards of complete truthfulness. Bechdel comments on the flexibility of autobiographical graphic narratives in comparison to their solely written counterparts mainly through her reflections on the evolution of her diary.
In Fun Home, Bechdel discusses how writing in her journal became a daily activity from when she was a small child until her teenage years. Her father teaches her to “Just write down what’s happening,” leading her to aim for factual accounts of the day’s activities (140). But as time goes on, “the minutely-lettered phrase I think begins to crop up” before Bechdel’s commentary of the events (141). The image that follows shows the small “I thinks” added into cramped spaces, seemingly as an afterthought, yet their constant presence demonstrates young Bechdel’s self-doubt and need for truth (141). Bechdel’s written observations cannot capture the “objective truth” she searches for, as they can only depict her “own perceptions, and perhaps not even those” (141). Eventually, Bechdel develops a symbol for these “I thinks” and feels compelled to add more and more until they completely cover the page and conceal her observations, a change that occurs after Bechdel loses even more confidence in herself for failing a imagined “initiation rite” during a family camping trip (143). As Bechdel moves from her childhood into the liminal space of being a teenager, her written diary feels further restrictive and becomes an inadequate means to capture her experiences.
As Bechdel ages, gains more self-awareness, and further questions everything, her writing style in her journals reflects these changes. Although Bechdel overcomes her compulsive inclusion of “I thinks,” a new form of punctuation, ellipses, has replaced them. An image of one diary entry shows how ellipses appear in every sentence, “to indicate not so much omission as hesitation” (162). Bechdel still doubts her ability to convey an objective truth through written words, so she hesitates between comments perhaps to replay events in her mind and emphasize her uncertainty. The ellipses also enable young Bechdel to skip from topic to topic, with the same image skipping from events such as her friend driving her around to watching a play with her father (162). Whenever Bechdel reaches a topic that makes her uncomfortable or that she does not want to dwell on or record, such as how “odd” she and Tammy looked, she uses an ellipsis to change the topic. As Bechdel ages, her feelings about events become more prevalent than that strict facts, but a need for objectivity in written accounts of her life continues restricting her until she finds an alternative means of expressing herself.
Bechdel’s struggle with journaling continues as she further realizes the limitations of presenting her own perception as “the truth.” Gradually, the “hard facts” ten-year old Bechdel sought to record “gave way to vagaries of emotion and opinion,” with images of these entries showing an increased number of comments dedicated to Bechdel’s thoughts on various events (169). These changes culminate in a diary entry about Bechdel’s first menstrual cycle pictured as “I think I started Ning or something. (HAHA)? How HORRID!” (168). Revealingly, this textual reproduction of Bechdel’s image fails to capture the emotion behind her penmanship, the feelings of frustration that permeate this “truth” and hide it “behind a hedge of qualifies, encryption, and stray punctuation” (169). Because the written medium cannot completely convey Bechdel’s perception of her life without straying from required conventions about “truthfulness” that even ten-year Bechdel knew to adhere to, she decides to instead conceal this truth. She substitutes the word “menstruating” with “Ning,” a practice she took from algebra, to record the end of her childhood without completely recognizing or accepting it. Writing alone is no longer a means for Bechdel to record and understand her life and so, she stops writing in her journal later that year (186). Bechdel’s focus on her journal writing and her gradual disinterest in it is mundane and relatable enough for most readers to not give it more consideration. But the focus she gives her journaling in her graphic narrative opens the possibility for it to be a metacommentary about writing versus comics. Writing alone fails to convey Bechdel’s life experiences because it constricted her to tell only the truth, a problem that did not occur as she wrote and drew her autobiography in Fun Home.
Bechdel’s frustrations with writing her diary are integral to understanding why she chose to tell her autobiography in graphic form and the differences between written and graphic narratives. While young Bechdel struggled with the need for truthfulness in her written accounts, her comic does not suffer from the same shortcomings because readers allow this medium more creative freedom and do not hold comics to the same standards of truthfulness even when they are nonfiction. Jared Gardner comments on the difference between lexical and graphic nonfiction representations in “First-Person Graphic, 1959-2010,” explaining, “The split between autographer and subject is etched on every page, the handcrafted nature of the images and the ‘autobifictional’…nature of the narrative is undeniable” (Gardner 131). Written autobiographies represent the author lexically, the same and only medium through which the story is told, making it easier for readers completely combine the narrator and author and assume they must always be one and the same. But in graphic narratives, the graphic symbol stands in for the human author and the story they tell which allows for more separation. Everything the reader sees, the author imagined and drew, reminding readers they are seeing someone else’s perception instead of the “objective truth” they expect from solely written narratives. Graphic narratives make visible “the compressions and gaps of its narrative (represented graphically by the gutterspace between the panels)” to foreground “the losses and glosses of memory and subjectivity” that permeate daily life but that most readers forget about when reading written autobiographies (Gardner 145). The restrictions Bechdel felt when journaling disappear when she instead presents her life in comic form because the medium replicates the imperfections of memory and the way perception impacts objective truth.
Graphic narrative enables Bechdel to tell her life story in a manner that emphasizes rather than reduces her perceptions, allowing her to depict events more symbolically rather than strictly as they occurred. Readers do not question how Bechdel could remember specific conversations from her childhood or what a person was wearing years ago because they understand her drawings as representations seen through Bechdel’s eyes. For the same reasons, readers also will not question how Bechdel can depict events she was never at, such as her father picking up and drinking with one of the teenaged brothers, thus giving her more creative freedom to show things integral to her story that she did not experience first-hand (Bechdel 161). One of the more illuminating instances of this freedom occurs when Bechdel questions if she would have also hidden her sexuality in the 1950s. As she contrasts her and her father’s lifestyles, Bechdel wonders, “Would I have had the guts to be one of those Eisenhower-era butches? / Or would I have married and sought succor from my high school students?” (108). Underneath the first sentence is an image of a young couple from behind, a presumably butch lesbian walking towards them, and the illustrious bar that 86’d Bechdel and her friends in the background between them. The next image shows the young couple entering the bar while the butch woman continues walking past. The young man is Bechdel’s father and he stares at the butch woman, likely contemplating her out lifestyle in contrast to his decision to hide his sexuality. The butch woman bears a striking resemblance to older Bechdel but with enough differences to keep things ambiguous. The combination of words and images unique to graphic narratives enables Bechdel to break away from reality, depicting an event that probably did not happen and that might be temporally impossible yet still ambiguous, to further characterize her complex relationship to her father. The written equivalent, something like “I could imagine myself(?) walking past them…”, arguably cannot achieve the same effects and would take readers out of the narrative given its deviations from the truth and plot. But in graphic form, this depiction is seamless. While neither form is superior to the other, they do different things with their narratives, with nonfiction graphic narratives being afforded more creative freedom. Fun Home is Bechdel’s autobiography meaning readers still expect it to be somewhat true and yet, its graphic form means they will allow it a different level of truth than if it was solely written down like the diary entries Bechdel gave up writing long ago.