Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

The memoir focuses on Bechdel's family, and is centered on her relationship with her father, Bruce. Bruce Bechdel was a funeral director and high school English teacher in Beech Creek, where Alison and her siblings grew up. The book's title comes from the family nickname for the funeral home, the family business in which Bruce Bechdel grew up and later worked; the phrase also refers ironically to Bruce Bechdel's tyrannical domestic rule. Bruce Bechdel's two occupations are reflected in Fun Home's focus on death and literature.