Fun Home Lesson Plan

Published in 2006, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic tells the story of Alison Bechdel's complex relationship with her father, Bruce Bechdel, an English teacher, funeral director, and expert in historical restoration who died in 1980. In the memoir, Bechdel reveals that her father was gay and in the closet: he had multiple affairs with other men, a fact of which Bechdel's mother Helen was unhappily aware, and likely committed statutory rape by seducing and sleeping with a number of teenage boys. Bechdel explores his character and its relationship to her own: Bruce was killed by a truck in 1980, and Bechdel believes that he killed himself. His death occurred four months after Bechdel, then a...