Respond to the following questions with short answers. Where appropriate, use quotes from the novel to support your answers. Each correct response is worth 10 points.

1.)Bechdel talks a lot about how her father was gay, but seems to gloss over the pedophilic nature of his relationship with her babysitter. Why do you think this is?

2.)The artistic style of the book is very simple: pen drawings similar to newspaper strip comics. Does this enhance or detract from the story? How?

3.)What role does literature play in this book?

4.)Bechdel claims that there was something entirely fictional about the life her family led. What does she mean by that?

5.)Bechdel clings to the notion that her coming out caused her father’s suicide because that cause and effect relationship provided a tenuous but real connection with him. What is at stake in that connection for her? Is this idea consistently developed in the novel?

6.)What methods does Bechdel use to interrogate the past, and why? For example, her close examination of the photo of Roy on pages 100-101.

7.)Bechdel describes her own style as one of “cool aesthetic distance” (67). What does she mean by that? Do you feel that is true about this memoir? After all, she does portray her own blood spattered on the page. . . .

9.)Do you think Bechdel uses Fun Home to draw her father closer to her? Explain.
In your opinion, what passage reveals something deep about this book?

10.)Bechdel seems to want to judge her father and to resist judging him, perhaps most notoriously on page 100 (where she asks the question about whether she’d react to the picture of her father and Roy if the lover were a teenage girl instead). What are the apparent limits of her investigation of her past, and her father’s past? How does she address or justify those limits?