Bechdel shows herself kissing an elephant while dressed in her pajamas, which really shows us just how long the process took. Another compulsion of Bechdel’s mentioned on page 137 is that she felt the need to kiss all of her stuffed animals: “No matter how tired I was after all this, I had to kiss each of my stuffed animals– and not just in a perfunctory way.” In the panel, which depicts Bechdel kissing her stuffed animals, it is clear that, among the other stuffed animals, there are three bears. She tries to line them up perfectly as to not show favoritism for one show, or parent, over the other. She labels the left shoe as her father and the right shoe as her mother.

On page 137, Bechdel mentions that one of her compulsions is perfectly lining up her sneakers. One reason Bechdel discusses her mental health in Fun Home is to show the direct effect that her parents had on her mental state growing up. Why include this section at all when the entire graphic novel has focused on Bechdel’s relationship with her father and their joint quest to find their respective sexualities? There are many reasons that Bechdel could have chosen to include this section, namely to accentuate the extent that she felt separated from her family, to compare how society, represented by her mother, has differing views about mental disorders and sexual orientation, and to show how reliable, or unreliable, she is as a narrator. It is unexpected so late in this story, on page 137, that Bechdel would include a lengthy section discussing her childhood Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Very few authors were writing openly about their own sexuality, and something even more revolutionary that Bechdel addressed was mental illness. Bechdel’s choice to write about her and her father’s simultaneous journey to finding their sexuality was revolutionary at the time.

Along the way, Bechdel finds her own sexuality. The graphic novel tells the story of Alison Bechdel’s attempt to find the truth about her father’s sexuality and what lead him to possibly commit suicide. The tragicomic Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel, is generally considered one of the most important pieces of the modern LGBTQ canon of literature.

Fun home alison