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Alison Bechdel's award-winning graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, widely recognized for its literary sophistication, was declared one of the best books published in 2006 by The New York Times and Time magazine.1 Much of the critical analysis of the book has focused on Bechdel's treatment of her intellectual and sexual development and her relationship with her father-themes familiar in the memoir genre. What is unusual in Bechdel's treatment of these themes is that she invariably filters them through her adventures in reading; as Hilary Chute notes in her definitive analysis of Bechdel's work, "Reading is the site where almost everything happens in Fun Home" (2010, 184). The family home is a repository of literary, historical and aesthetic books, of dictionaries, private letters and diaries, of newspapers, catalogues, official documents, maps and family photographs-texts and images that are read and read into by the narrator.
Critics have explored insightfully the role played by literature in shaping Bechdel's parents' identities, desires and expectations as well as her own, but for the most part those analyses assume a single mode of reading. This essay will lay out how, in the course of her development, Alison falls under the influence of her father, her teachers and her lovers, each promoting a different mode of reading: reading for identification, reading for parallels and symbolic meanings, reading for the sensual pleasure of language. By negotiating with, appropriating, and revising those models, Bechdel arrives ultimately at her own reading practice which is neither an opposition to nor a harmonious resolution of those influences but an ongoing struggle.
Reading in Fun Home is a site of dynamic tension played out between father and daughter, between the high culture of modernism and the low culture of comics, and-within the graphic medium itself-between words and images. Bechdel deliberately leaves these struggles unresolved, creating in both herself and her readers an intense self-consciousness about the complexity of the reading process. I will argue that Bechdel illuminates that complexity in Fun Home by drawing her readers' attention to the materiality of reading: the book as object and the page in its spatial layout, language as sensuous sound and rhythm, and the embodied experience of both writers and readers. As practiced by Bechdel, as well as...