Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Chapter 6 opens on a splash page of Helen doing her makeup in the mirror.

This chapter hinges on a pubescent Alison’s diary entries, which provide first-hand accounts of a particularly pivotal summer. “There was a lot going on that summer. I’m glad I was taking notes. Otherwise I’d find the degree of synchronicity implausible” (154).

The first entry Bechdel presents is one wherein she discovered that her father is attending court ordered psychiatric appointments. When she asked him why he had to go, he responded: “I’m bad. Not good like you” (153). Bechdel reveals that he was charged with “furnishing a malt beverage to a minor” (175). Other events from the summer include the emergence of the 17-year cicadas, the Watergate scandal, Alison’s first period, and Helen’s performance as Lady Bracknell in a local production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

The police report describing Bruce’s infraction made no mention of a sexual element of his crime. Bechdel compares her father’s trial to that of Oscar Wilde’s: “My father did not provoke a burst of applause in the courtroom, as Oscar Wilde had, with an impassioned plea for understanding of ‘such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan’” (180).