Fun Home: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

In 1976, Bruce took Alison and her brothers to New York City to see all the ships gathered for the bicentennial of the founding of the United States. Helen remained in Beech Creek to perform in a local run of the play You Can’t Take It With You. Bruce and the kids stayed at Helen’s friend Elly’s apartment in Greenwich Village. This time, at age 15, Alison saw the Village anew: as she observed what appeared to be homosexual men, she began to feel that homosexuality was not only harmless, but actually a positive force. She was as moved by her own open-minded tolerance as she was by the ever-present displays of male fashion and masculine beauty.

Alison narrates that the weekend was gay all around, over an image of Baryshnikov at the ballet. Elly took Bruce and Alison to see her friends Richard and Tom, and though no one said so, Alison figured that they were a gay couple. Richard was illustrating a children’s filmstrip about Pinocchio—Alison admired his markers. The group somehow got tickets to see A Chorus Line, which had just swept the Tony Awards. Alison includes an illustration of herself and Bruce watching a kid on stage say, “One day I looked at myself in the mirror and said, “You’re fourteen years old and you’re a faggot. What are you going to do with your life?”

Alison narrates that she didn’t draw a conscious parallel between the musical and her own sexuality, much less to Bruce’s. However, the experience left Alison “supple and open to possibility.” The next morning, John wandered off, and Alison didn’t understand Bruce’s concern until Elly explained that there were guys out there who would “prey on young boys.” John soon returned on his own—he’d wandered down Christopher Street to look for ships when he noticed a man watching him, so he headed back toward Elly’s apartment. The man followed, asking if John liked boats, and instinctively John humored the man until they neared the apartment. When they got close John took off and ran as fast as he could into the building. Allison narrates that she didn’t know about the man until years later, or perhaps she had blocked it out.

After reprimanding John, Bruce was quick to forgive and took the family to more museums. Shortly after that, Elly left on her own vacation and Bruce and the kids stayed for a few more days. They had a disappointing view of the ships sailing by during the bicentennial, but a great view of the crowd. Similarly, they had a blocked view of the fireworks that night. As the kids got ready for bed, Bruce got ready to go out “for a drink.” He told the kids to sleep, which they did despite an extra loud New York City night.

When Alison tries to imagine what Bruce’s life might have been like if he hadn’t died in 1980, she doesn’t get far. Alison imagines that if he’d lived during those early years of AIDS, Alison might have lost her father in a more painful, prolonged way. In that scenario, she may have even lost Helen, too. Alison says perhaps she’s trying to replace her actual grief about Bruce with imaginary trauma. But Alison wonders if this idea is really so far fetched. After all, the nonfiction AIDS book And The Band Played On opens at the bicentennial. Or, perhaps Alison is trying to render her “senseless personal loss meaningful” by connecting it to the common homophobia-driven narrative of injustice surrounding the AIDS crisis.

Alison is tempted to say that the story of homophobia is her father’s story. She notes that there’s a certain emotional gratification to claiming Bruce as “a tragic victim of homophobia. But that’s a problematic line of thought” because, for one, it makes it difficult for Alison to blame Bruce for his own actions. For another, it leads Alison to a peculiar problem with her own identity. If Bruce had “come out” as a young man and never married Helen, where would that leave Alison? Alison consults the dictionary for its definition of a father, which reads “a man who has begotten a child.”

In Alison’s earliest memories, Bruce’s return home from work always signaled the end of playtime for Helen, Christian and Alison. Bruce didn’t have much affection for small kids, but as Alison grew older, Bruce sensed her “potential as an intellectual companion.” Bruce attempted to recommend to Alison books like The Catcher in the Rye, but Bruce’s many years of distance left Alison wary, so she ignored his recommendations. But when Alison ended up in one of Bruce’s high school English courses, she found she liked the books Bruce wanted her to read, including The Catcher in the Rye. She excelled as a student in his class, making her sometimes feel like only she and Bruce were in the room together.

This feeling of closeness with her father was novel for Alison. Alison believes that both she and Bruce were starved for attention. They grew even closer when Alison went away to college—the books Alison was assigned for her English class continued to serve as their connective currency. At first, Alison was glad to have Bruce’s help with her freshman English class, which often confounded her. She didn’t understand why they “couldn’t just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on them.” Alison wasn’t the only student who failed “to grasp the symbolic function of literature,” and their teacher often grew frustrated with the class. Their papers came back marked up with red pen, most often with the phrase “WW” for “wrong word.”

Alison kept trying to please her teacher with essays influenced by coaching from her father. However, now that Alison thinks back on it, she’s unsure whether Bruce served as “the vicarious teacher or the vicarious student” in his rants to her. Eventually, Bruce’s excitement began to leave no room for Alison’s own, and by the end of the year Alison felt suffocated. When she was assigned to read A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, Bruce tells Alison she had better identify with “every page.”

The next semester Alison didn’t enroll in any English classes, and swore to never take one again. But a year and a half later she was forced to, and settled on a course solely devoted to reading James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, which was also Bruce’s favorite book. Alison’s interview to get into the class with Professor Avery also occurred on the same afternoon that she realized in the campus book store that she was a lesbian. Indeed, Alison writes that on that day she embarked “on an odyssey which, consisting as it did in gradual, episodic, and inevitable convergence with” Bruce, was nearly as epic as the odyssey depicted in Ulysses.

When she was home for Christmas, Alison found Bruce’s delight about Ulysses a bit off-putting. Bruce gave her the copy he read in college, and told her to read Dubliners and especially one of the stories in it: “The Dead”. Even so, in a moment of tenderness, Alison asked Bruce’s advice about which Joyce work she should read first. He was elated.

Ulysses is itself based on The Odyssey. Alison notes that the Trojan War, which comprises the elaborate backstory to The Odyssey, is often blamed on Helen of Troy, but Paris was equally culpable. Paris—the city—plays a similarly inciting role in Alison’s own odyssey when Bruce gave Alison the book Earthly Paradise, the autobiography by Colette detailing the lesbian scene of Paris in the 1920s.

Alison and Bruce did not discuss Earthly Paradise, and Alison added it to her growing stack of lesbian literature. At the same time, 768 pages of Ulysses lay there waiting to be read. The class met in Professor Avery’s living room. Mr. Avery, who had hurt his back, reclined on the couch and asked the class: “if one of Joyce’s themes is paternity, then why is the story about Stephen and Bloom, who are virtual strangers, and not about Stephen’s actual, physical father?” One students answered that it is because Bloom is Stephen’s “spiritual father.” Alison still found literary criticism a suspect activity, and she wonders whether it’s necessary to point out every last point of correspondence between The Odyssey and Ulysses—though without them, she finds the book nearly impossible to understand.

But then, Alison also had little patience for Joyce because her “own odyssey was calling.” Alison refers to her growing pile of lesbian literature as “sirens” that she couldn’t resist while she fell further and further behind in reading Ulysses, though she attended class consistently. In class, Alison doodled on her pages while not really paying attention to her teacher and classmates, having no clue what many ideas they discussed were referring to. By the time the term ended, Alison still had two hundred pages of Ulysses to read, and, still wrapped up in her lesbian exploration, felt no need to finish it.

At the beginning of the next semester, Alison still hadn’t met with Professor Avery for her Ulysses oral exam, but she had a more daunting test to face first, a “descent into the underworld” in the form of joining the Gay Union. Alison narrates that Odysseus sailing into Hades couldn’t have felt more trepidation than she did entering that room. After a week there, Alison’s quest became external, and she began to tell people she was gay. Alison’s parents received her coming out letter the same day Alison faked her way through the Ulysses exam. Bruce called to talk to Alison but failed to mention his own homosexuality. “Like Stephen and Bloom at the national library,” Alison and Bruce’s paths crossed, but they did not truly meet.

Three weeks later, Helen told Alison about Bruce’s big secret. Though Alison was still striving to understand her own sexuality, this news about her father’s sexuality and hidden affairs swamped her own internal struggles. The next day she received a letter from Bruce that left her even more confused. Rather than at last confiding in Alison, Bruce took the approach of assuming that Alison already knew he was gay, though he wrote the letter before Alison had spoken to Helen, so in fact she did not. Alison narrates that Bruce believed she thought he was “queer,” and that she believed that he knew Alison was queer, too. Alison read the letter as lesbian friends invited her to a concert. Alison chose not to go, and though Alison felt she was “adrift,” her course was clear: it lay between the “Scylla” of her peers and the “sucking Charybdis” of her family.

Over an image of Alison’s face near Joan’s pelvis, Alison narrates that going toward her peers felt like the safer route. Like Odysseus on the island of the Cyclops, Alison found in Joan a “being of colossal strength and ferocity, to whom the law of man and God meant nothing.” Over two illustrations of Alison performing oral sex on Joan, she says she went toward what she feared, yet while Odysseus schemed to escape the Cyclops’s cave, Alison found she was content to stay in the cave forever. Joan was a poet, activist, and the closest a human can be to a Cyclops, because a boy with a toy arrow had shot one of her eyes out during Joan’s childhood.

Alison’s first trip home after coming out of the closet to her parents was not a happy time. Alison felt that the home she had known as a child had disappeared. Some integral aspect of the family structure seemed to be missing. The Bechdels ate in silence, and then John, Christian, and Bruce all left for various solitary activities. When they were alone, Helen took Alison into her confidence, telling Alison tales of Bruce’s misdeeds, including how he often cheated on her in New York, got speeding tickets, lied, and shoplifted. “Like Odysseus’s faithful Penelope,” Helen had kept the Bechdel household going for twenty years with an effectively absent husband. Shocking as this was for Alison to hear, it was the first time Helen spoke to her as an adult, and Alison advised her mother to leave Bruce because she’d done enough.

Each day of vacation, Alison went to the local college library, and though she had a paper to write for a Philosophy of Art class, the “sirens” called once more and she began reading Flying by Kate Millett. Alison checked the book out and was “riveted.” Alison had been waiting for alone time with her dad, and when she got some she mentioned that the gay group at her college was planning on picketing the movie Cruising. When Bruce asked her why, Alison was unprepared to follow it up. Alison dropped the subject, “Partly because of his derision, but mostly because of the fear in his eyes.”

At the end of the week, Bruce and Alison went to go see the movie Coal Miner’s Daughter. On the way, Alison was determined to try again, and she asked Bruce if he knew what he was doing when he gave her the Colette book. Bruce said it was just a hunch. Bruce then recounted to Alison how he had his first gay experience when he was fourteen, with a farmhand named Norris Johnson, and it was nice. Then, Bruce added there was another boy his senior year of college. Bruce then told Alison that when he was little, he wanted to be a girl and he’d dress up in girls’ clothes. Alison, excited, exclaimed that she wanted to be a boy and dressed in boys’ clothes. Alison narrates that this exchange wasn’t the “sobbing, joyous reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus,” but rather it was more like Stephen Dedalus and the sonless Bloom having their late-night cocoa near the end of Ulysses.

But, Alison asks: which of Alison and Bruce was the father? Alison notes that she felt “distinctly parent” while listening to Bruce, who spoke as if filled with shame. All too soon they arrived at the theater. In the movie, a character played by Loretta Lynn tells her father that she will see him again, but that he dies before she actually can. Alison then says that she saw Bruce one more time before his death, but they never discussed their sexuality again. They had their “Ithaca moment.” After the movie, Bruce took Alison to a notorious local nightspot: the front was a topless club, and the back a gay bar. This could have been Bruce and Alison’s “Circe chapter, like when Stephen and Bloom drink at the brothel in nighttown,” but Alison was denied entry at the door and she and Bruce drove home in mortified silence.

Alison returned to school and her relationship with Joan. A letter from Bruce followed expressing his excitement at reading the Kate Millett book. In an “unconscious” gesture, Alison had left Flying for Bruce just as he had given her the “Trojan horse gift of Colette.” At the end of the semester, Joan came home to visit Alison’s family. Alison didn’t introduce Joan as her girlfriend. Over an image of Alison and Bruce playing “Heart and Soul” together on the piano, Alison narrates that it was the last time she saw her father. On that final evening, a family friend remarked to Joan that Alison and Bruce’s close relationship was “really unnatural. Er… I mean, unusual.” Alison then narrates that it was unusual, and they “were close. But not close enough.”

In Ulysses, there is a scene where Bloom rides with other men, including Stephen’s father, to a friend’s funeral. One of the men remarks that worst of all is the man who takes his own life, which reminds Bloom of his own father’s death. Rudolph Bloom had committed suicide by purposely overdosing, but he left a letter for his son. Bruce left no such note. After Bruce’s funeral, Alison’s life resumed its course. Grief takes many forms, she says, including the absence of grief, and when Alison told a casual acquaintance of her father’s death, she laughed so much that he didn’t believe that Bruce had really died. Alison found the fact that her vital, passionate father was decomposing in a grave “ridiculous.”

In one of Bruce’s courtship letters to Helen, he praised her by comparing her writing to Joyce’s, saying it was even better than Joyce’s writing aside form Joyce’s line “and he asked me with his eyes.” Alison narrates that “In a telling mistake,” Bruce had credited “the beseeching eyes to Bloom instead of to his wife, Molly.” Alison asks how Bruce could have admired Joyce saying “yes” to his own passions and pursuits by writing Ulysses, yet said “no” to his own internal life and passions. Alison says a lifetime spent hiding his “erotic truth” might have impacted that. Sexual shame is its own sort of death, and Ulysses, too, “was banned” for a long time because people believed it to be obscene.

The front of Alison’s Modern Library Edition of Ulysses includes the decision by the judge who lifted the ban in 1933, as well as a letter from Joyce detailing Ulysses’ publication history, in which he mentions that Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were “prosecuted for running episodes in their magazine, the Little Review.” He also acknowledges the risk Sylvia Beach took in publishing a manuscript no one else wanted to put out. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that all these women were lesbians, but Alison likes to think, “they went to the mat for this book because they were lesbians, because they knew a thing or two about erotic truths.”

Alison narrates that “erotic truth” is a sweeping concept and she shouldn’t pretend to know what Bruce’s was. Perhaps her eagerness to claim Bruce as gay in the way that she’s gay as opposed to bisexual or any other category is just a way for Alison to keep Bruce to herself, as “a sort of inverted oedipal complex.” Alison thinks back to Bruce’s letter in which he did and didn’t come out to her. In it, he disavows himself as “not a hero,” the exact same “disavowal Stephen Dedalus makes at the beginning of Ulysses In the end, James Joyce broke his contract with Beach and sold Ulysses to Random House for a nice payday, and he didn’t offer to repay her for the financial sacrifices she made for the book.

Beach put on a good face, writing, “A baby belongs to its mother, not to the midwife, doesn’t it?” And as long as the book is being compared to children, Alison notes that it fared far better than Joyce’s actual children, one of whom went mad, while the other became an alcoholic. Alison supposes that this is consistent with Ulysses’ “theme that spiritual, not consubstantial, paternity is the important thing.” Then Alison wonders what might have happened if Icarus hadn’t fallen into the sea—what might he have created if he’d inherited Daedalus’s inventive capabilities?

Over an image of an oncoming truck approaching, Alison notes that Icarus “did hurtle into the sea, of course.” But then, over an image of Alison as a girl jumping off the diving board into the water with Bruce waiting to catch her, Alison narrates that “in the tricky reverse narration” that drives the intertwined stories of she and her father, Bruce “was there to catch” Alison when she leapt.