43-year-old cartoonist Alison Bechdel is trying to piece together her childhood, one caption at a time. In painstaking detail, she tries to remember what it was like to grow up in the Fun Home, her family's funeral home slash neurotically preserved 18th century Victorian house. Or what it was like to feel the joy of coming out collide with her family’s turmoil and tragedy. Some captions are pretty straightforward: “Caption: Sometimes my father appeared to enjoy having children, but the real object of his affection was his house.” Other captions, like “I leapt out of the closet. And four months later, my father killed himself by stepping in front of a truck” are a bit harder for Alison to unpack.
Luckily Alison isn’t reliving her childhood alone. She has her two brothers, John and Christian, accomplices and collaborators in helping her childhood-self create a commercial for the Fun Home, short for the Bechdel Family Fun(eral) Home. There's her mother Helen, who held Alison’s family together until it finally fell apart. There’s her first love Joan who helps Alison accept herself and her newfound sexuality. There's her father Bruce, whom Alison is either exactly like or nothing alike at all. And there are also embodied versions of her nine- and nineteen-year-old selves who relive Alison’s familiar yet elusive experiences of adolescence.
As Alison plunges into her memories full-throttle, she struggles to tell her own story, questioning whether chronicling her convoluted upbringing is even possible. Piecing together a coherent narrative pushes Alison towards poetic conclusions that she tries to resist in favor of the truth, which doesn't always make for a pretty narrative or a neat picture.
—Fiona Selmi