The room allowed Bruce to lean into his affectations so thoroughly that “for all practical purposes” it became real, and Bruce saw himself as the put-together family man fantasy he projected to the world. But Bruce also uses the room to flirt with and charm his high school students, including Roy, who he would then have affairs with. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel tracing her journey from young girl to young adult as she comes to grips with her own lesbian sexuality, her father Bruce ’s (most likely) suicide, and his secret homosexuality or bisexuality that he kept hidden throughout his life while having affairs with underage boys. In the library, Bruce imagines himself as “a nineteenth century aristocrat overseeing his estate from behind the leather-topped mahogany and brass second-empire desk,” designing the rest of the space with that in mind. Within the home, the library serves as the epicenter of the house’s artificiality, and so it symbolically represents the epitome of Bruce’s own artifice. Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir that charts her fraught relationship with her late father. In Alison’s view, Bruce’s labyrinthine design is constructed to “make things appear to be what they were not,” or in other words, make Bruce seem like a heterosexual, loyal family man on the surface when, deep down, that was far from the truth. Alison compares the house to the mythical labyrinth Daedalus built to entrap the Minotaur, and in that comparison her father serves as both Daedalus (the designer) and the Minotaur (the monster lurking within). She uses specific historical events to contextualize the difference between her own experience of coming out and her fathers inability to do so. The design of the Bechdels’ old, Gothic Revival house that Bruce is obsessed with restoring and furnishing itself becomes a symbol for the artificial way that Bruce constructs his life. Bechdel interlaces American gay history into her own narrative throughout Fun Home, most noticeably in the final chapter.

Fun house alison bechdel