fun home two

I was sort of right. When I read on, I found that Alison writes on page 196, panel 3 "...A narrative of injustice, of seuxal shame and fear, of life considered expendable. It is tempting to say that, in fact, this IS my father's story." So, its kinda like she's narrating the story for both her and her father. Their life story. A story of two gay people, father and daughter, one who stayed in the closet and ultimately died, and one who came out and discovered new horizons. The funny thing is, no one else in their family turned out to be gay. Only Alison. Genetics are a fickle thing, I guess. Another funny thing is how she speculates after saying the above comment (in the panel, she's smoking a lone cigarette on a pier): "There's a certain emotional expedience to claiming him as a tragic victim of homophobia, but that's a problematic line of thought. For one thing, it makes it harder for me to blame him. And for another, it leads to a particularly literal cul-de-sac. If my father had "come out" in his youth, if he had not met and married my mother... where would that leave me?" I mean, I'm certain people have at least once in their lives thought "what if my parents had never met?" But for Alison, its "what if my dad had come out?"

The fact that Alison did come out, is what sets her apart from her father. Very similar people, albeit with different aesthetic taste, but resembling each other nonetheless. I think she came out because although she knew that she had inevitably become homosexual (I mean, she blames her father), she knew that she could do something about it, differently from her father. I think she realized this (that she was different from her father, or at least wanted to be) at a pretty early age; for example, page 15: "I was spartan to my father's athenian. Modern to his victorian. Butch to his nelly. Utilitarian to his aesthete." I guess as she grew up, she found that she could still be homosexual but could use that to rebel against her father. This is the generation gap.

All in all, she just didn't want to be like him. But in a way, she did become like him. The ending lines of the book were really profound and moving. "He did hurtle into the sea, of course. But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt."