Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Reading Check and Short Answer questions on key points are designed for guided reading assignments, in-class review, formative assessment, quizzes, and more.

Chapters 1-3

Reading Check

1. What is Bruce’s job?

2. When did Bruce pass away?

3. Where is Alison’s hometown?

4. By what nickname do the Bechdels refer to the funeral home?

5. What gift does Helen give Joan at Bruce’s funeral?

6. What is the shape of Bruce’s grave marker?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. How does the game of “airplane” that Bruce plays with Alison at the beginning of the novel establish a connection to a parent-child relationship from ancient myth?

2. What final question troubles Alison at the end of Chapter 1? Why might she answer this question in both the affirmative and the negative?

3. What leads Alison to worry that her sexual orientation had something to do with her father’s death?

4. What are some reasons that Bruce admired F. Scott Fitzgerald?

5. How did Bruce change after he and Helen got married?

6. Why did Bruce become a funeral director?

Paired Resource

“Come to the Fun Home”

• This is a song from the musical adaptation of Fun Home that refers to the Bechdel funeral home as the “fun home.”
• This video connects to the theme of Dichotomies and Parallels in how “funeral” is shortened to “fun,” speaking to the relationship Alison has with death from a young age.
• How does this song compare to what we learn about the Bechdel funeral home in Fun Home? Did the tone of this song meet your expectations for a musical adaptation of this subject matter? How does the tone itself connect to the theme of Dichotomies and Parallels?

Chapters 4-5

Reading Check

1. What is Bruce’s favorite flower?

2. Where did Alison and her brothers go on vacation when she was eight?

3. What major event had recently occurred when Alison and her family arrived in New York City?

4. Who is Roy?

5. How did Alison realize that she had developed obsessive-compulsive disorder?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. What does it mean when Bechdel writes that she and her father were “inversions of one another”? (Chapter 4)

2. Why might Alison have included illustrations of photos of herself and her father?

3. Why did Alison stop writing poetry after her father improvised a stanza for her poem about springtime?

4. Why does Alison call her childhood home an “artist’s colony”?

Paired Resource

“Lesbian Cartoonist Alison Bechdel Countered Dad’s Secrecy By Being Out and Open”

• This is an NPR interview with Bechdel, Lisa Kron, and Jeanine Tesori in which Bechdel discusses her sexuality.
• How does this interview further explore the themes of Closeted Queerness and Queer Experience or Dichotomies and Parallels?

“Drawn From Life: The World of Alison Bechdel”

• This New Yorker article by Judith Thurman describes Bechdel’s work and her experience drawing comics based on her life.
• This article connects to themes of Dichotomies and Parallels and Artifice and Self-Expression.
• So much of Fun Home focuses on Alison’s relationship with her father. How does this article shed light on her relationship with her mother, and how does it connect to the themes of Dichotomies and Parallels and Artifice and Self-Expression?

Chapters 6-7

Reading Check

1. To whose trial does Alison compare her father’s?

2. Where do Alison, her brothers, and their father spend the Fourth of July in 1976?

3. Over what topic do Alison and her father bond when she is a senior in high school?

4. Which important novel does Alison read in college that affects her deeply?

5. How does Fun Home end?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. Why does Bruce have to go to court-ordered psychiatric appointments?

2. Name and discuss one significant event that occurs in the summer Alison describes in Chapter 6.

3. Why did Alison refer to masturbation and menstruation as “Ning”?

4. What would Alison do when her father was out of the house?

5. Why might Bruce have been particularly forgiving when John wanders off into a gay neighborhood in New York?

Paired Resource

“Intertextuality in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home”

• This essay by Catlin Walker, a professor at Rutgers University, takes a nuanced look at the many layers of allusion in Fun Home.
• One of the motifs in this novel is books and literature. How does this essay shed light on Bechdel’s use of literature to explore her life and her relationship with her father?

Recommended Next Reads 

Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel

• This graphic memoir explores Alison Bechdel’s relationship with her mother and their understanding of art.
• Shared themes include Closeted Queerness and Queer Experience and Artifice and Self-Expression.
• Shared topics include queerness, self-expression, books and literature, and memoir.
• Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama on SuperSummary

Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe

• This graphic memoir explores Kobabe’s (e/em/eir) life and exploration of eir identity as nonbinary and asexual.
• Shared themes include Closeted Queerness and Queer Experience.
• Shared topics include memoir, family, and queerness.
• Gender Queer on SuperSummary

One! Hundred! Demons! by Lynda Barry

• This is a semi-autobiographical graphic memoir by Lynda Barry explaining how she confronted her own personal demons.
• Shared themes include Artifice and Self-Expression.
• Shared topics include family, coming of age, and memoir.
• One! Hundred! Demons! on SuperSummary