FUN HOME Banned Book Review — For the Book and Against the Ban

Author Testimonial about Fun Home

"I don’t remember the first time I read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. My copy is worn and creased, with brightly colored sticky notes still marking relevant pages from when I wrote a paper on it my senior year of high school. What I do remember, though, and probably always will, is the beautiful, moving, and haunting story told by Bechdel about her father and her family. Fun Home is an unforgettable book, so raw and honest it tears you open, and I find that each reread reveals more insight on the nature of families, queerness, and love. Many of my lesbian friends have expressed feeling seen and understood by this book in a way they never had before and have even used its language to express their feelings to their own families. And while my own queerness and my own family both have very little in common with Bechdel’s, one of the most successful things about this stunning memoir is that, in the deeply personal details of Bechdel’s life, it finds ways to touch on truths that resonate with everyone who reads it."

When, Where and Why Fun Home Has Been Banned

Marshall University’s Library page states that Fun Home has been challenged multiple times across the United States since its publication in 2007, largely due to its LGBTQ+ themes and occasional portrayals of nudity. These challenges have occurred mostly in high schools throughout Michigan, New Jersey, Missouri, and Nevada. Fun Home has also been challenged in universities in California, Utah, and North and South Carolina and public libraries in Missouri. Most of these challenges, especially ones concluding in the banning or removal of the book, have occurred since 2016, with many occurring in the last 3 years as anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment has seen a rise across the nation. The book was banned in the Wentzville, MO school district in 2022, along with several other LGBTQ+ and anti-racist books. According to Marshall University Libraries, it was removed from a 10th grade reading list in Clark County, NV in 2022 due to alleged “drug use, graphic sexual violence, and anti-religious sentiments”. In high schools in Troy, MI in 2022 and in the North Hunterdon-Voorhees School District (NJ) in 2020, due to concerns about nudity and sexual content, Fun Home was restricted to be read by students with explicit parental consent, although this decision was rescinded in the NJ case.

According to a 2017 interview with Rachel Cooke in The Guardian, since its publication in 2007, Fun Home has been made into a Tony-winning musical. Bechdel said in the interview of the process of writing Fun Home, “It was such a huge project: six or seven years of drawing and excavating. It was sort of like living in a trance. I had to do everything I could to figure it all out”.

Plot Synopsis / Summary

Fun Home follows Bechdel throughout her childhood and young adulthood, exploring her charged relationship with her father leading up to his death when she is in college, though she speculates on whether it was accidental or suicide. The title, Fun Home, takes its name from the funeral home run by her father’s family. Following a non-linear timeline, Bechdel uses literary allusion and precise, introspective narration to reflect on her father’s queerness as a closeted gay man in a rural Pennsylvania town, and its relationship to her own as a butch lesbian. The book touches on themes of love, mortality, and intimacy as it speaks to Bechdel’s relationship with her family and her childhood home. She reflects on her own masculinity as a response to her father’s femininity, and her expression of queerness as a young adult as a response to her father’s suppression of his queerness throughout her childhood.

Selected Excerpt that Epitomizes Why Fun Home is a Valuable Contribution to Our Culture

This excerpt details the complications of Bechdel’s relationships to her parents and to her father’s queerness, evoking intense emotions within both Alison and the reader.
“I had imagined my confession as an emancipation from my parents, but instead I was pulled back into their orbit. And with my father’s death following so hard on the heels of this doleful coming-out party, I could not help assume a cause-and-effect relationship. If I had not felt compelled to share my little sexual discovery, perhaps the semi would have passed without incident four months later. Why had I told them? I hadn’t even had sex with anyone yet. Conversely, my father had been having sex with men for years and not telling anyone.”

Book Structure/Details

The book is a graphic memoir, and is best suited for mature readers, both in terms of content and in terms of Bechdel’s complex vocabulary and dense prose. However, it is a quick and absorbing read, especially recommended to those interested in LGBTQ+ themes and explorations of family relationships in rural Americana.

Recommendations on Best-Match Audience for Fun Home

Fun Home is most important for queer, especially lesbian, communities. In this author’s opinion, it is important to read as a young adult, since Bechdel explores the confusion and resentment of being a young queer person with fraught family relationships. However, it’s precisely young adults that Fun Home is being banned from, since many of the challenges have occurred in high schools and universities.

Content warnings: 
Nudity, suicide, portrayal of obsessive-compulsive disorder, discussion of sexual relations between minors and adults.

Fun Home Study Guide: Recommended Discussion Topics & Questions

• Discuss Bruce’s relationship with Alison, as well as Helen. From there, compare that to the relationships presented within the family as a whole

• Further investigate Helen’s relationship with Alison.**

• Go over how mental health is portrayed by Bechdel, through characters Bruce and Alison.

• Discuss the idea of artistic passion and how it is portrayed by Bechdel, through the characters of Alison, Bruce, and Helen

• For queer reading groups, discuss your personal experiences of relationships between queer and heteronormative family members.

**for more exploration of this, Bechdel has published a second memoir called Are You My Mother?

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