Fun Home

  In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, her narrator’s recollection of time passing is marked by her daily journaling, which goes through many changes and phases, just as she does. However, as she ages, her journaling becomes more and more unreliable until she finally gives up on it (186). With the end of her journaling, she applies an uncertainty about the words that she writes from then on: “I’m only estimating that this episode took place in December. There’s no mention of it in my diary. By the end of November, my earnest daily entries had given way to the implicit lie of the blank page, and weeks at a time are left unrecorded” (186). Even earlier, Bechdel informs readers that she let “false humility, overwrought penmanship, and self-disgust… cloud [her] testimony” (169).
Bechdel’s phases of journaling, though not always the most genuine or accurate, portray the struggles she was facing at each point in life. When she was severely struggling with her obsessive compulsive disorder and anxiety, her journaling reflected that all-consuming stress: “my diary was rapidly becoming as onerous as the rest of my life” (142). During this time, her recordings were very accurate because of her obsession with marking every sentence with “I think,” just in case she was somehow incorrect in what she was experiencing. However, her words on the page represented the state of her brain due to anxiety: illegible, messy, and falling short of what she really felt.
When she got her period, she created an encoded version of the word “menstruating” so she didn’t have to admit to herself that she was aging, which she did “according to the practice in algebra of denoting complex or unknown quantities with letters. ‘X’ would have been obvious. Using ‘N’ created a participle so nondescript it could mean practically anything” (169). She attempts to block this occasion in her diary, while still trying to be semi-accurate. By doing so, she is repressing important life events (of which there were many) in her journal while also avoiding them in real life, too. Her journaling is an impressive symbol of the turmoil of her coming of age amidst the difficulties she and her family faced.


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