Review: ‘Fun Home’ Opens Window into Queer Family Secrets, Slippery Memories

Fun Home is a beautiful queer memoir-musical about investigating one’s past and wrestling with the maddening slipperiness of memory. Based on Alison Bechdel’s award-winning graphic memoir, the story follows Alison’s childhood, coming of age, and coming out story as a butch lesbian, as well as her attempts to understand her closeted gay father. A few months after Alison comes out to her father in her first semester at Oberlin College, he kills himself by jumping in front of a truck. Are these two incidents related? Adult Alison tries to piece together her history, sharing the stage with her memories of young and teenage Alison growing up in her family home. Fun Home beautifully blends temporalities, representing how memory is the present self that is wrestling with an inevitably distorted, incomplete past. Winner of five Tony Awards including Best Musical, Fun Home is truly a masterpiece. A live orchestra performs a soaring, hard-hitting score by Jeanine Tesori, based on a tenderly written book and lyrics by Lisa Kron.

A brilliant and singular contribution of queer art to the canon, Fun Home is rooted in the details of Bechdel’s life. Masterful set design by Tanya Orlando brought to life the house that Bechdel grew up in – a beautiful antique-filled house that her father meticulously maintains. Fun Home convincingly takes us on the ride of memory work that author Bechdel went on as an adult. It becomes clear this work is not for the faint of heart. Invited to watch with a detective’s eye for detail, the audience parses through Bechdel’s memories – looking for clues in her and her father’s relationship to explain the sometimes inexplicable dimensions of real life. As a lesbian cartoonist, Alison Bechdel’s memory work originally processed into and represented her memories as a graphic novel. In the musical, the slippage of memory is clear, as adult Alison sometimes struggles to pull up the right “caption” for her experiences as she attempts to write and draw her way into making sense of things.

Bechdel desperately attempts to understand her father, a complex figure who is both loving and at times cruel. Bechdel’s empathy for her father, especially given their parallel histories as gay people constrained by a heteronormative society, imbues her memories with tenderness. In some ways, Bechdel is her father’s closest confidante, receiving long letters and books. In other ways, he fails to fully see her, especially as she comes into adulthood and out of the closet. Bechdel thus faces the great frustration of leaping out of the closet but still landing squarely in her closeted father’s world in some ways.

As a musical, Fun Home brings Bechdel’s iconic graphic novel to popular audiences. The music expresses emotionality in ways that words cannot. The live orchestra, suspended above the stage in an elevated glass panel, brings to life the feeling of being tortured by the past’s inconclusiveness with sharp lyrics and beautifully composed music. As Jack Halberstam writes in the book Female Masculinity (1988) about the song “Ring of Keys,” written by Kron, which is about Bechdel’s first time seeing a butch woman:

“what the young Alison feels for the anonymous butch who crosses her path has no words, cannot be culled from any archives of feeling, gay or straight, and so is captured in that open-mouthed, soundless wonder that punctuates the song. The mouth, open and silent, mimics the ring of keys that say everything without speaking, that jangle a noisy song of their own without words, that say butch in a way that ordinary language could not”.

It was a privilege to see such unique queer art. The audience is able to witness a cultural moment in which butch representation is proudly on stage and a site of cultural investigation, when for so much of Western history female masculinity has been repressed, including in art. Even in Bechdel’s own life, as Fun Home represents, her butchness is marginalized as a child, with her dad – although a gay man– telling her that dressing like a tomboy rather than wearing a pretty dress to the party will only make her stick out. This is the substance of real life, parental relations, and personal memory that is most difficult to make sense of, but that Fun Home does so sharply and artistically.