Judging a Family Tragicomic by Its Cover
I was probably the only one who didn’t notice this right away, but as I was picking up my copy of Fun Home last week, I realized that Bruce Bechdel is the only member of Alison’s family that is not featured on the cover (for this particular edition of the book). This shocked me at first, seeing as the novel revolves so centrally around Alison and the relationship with her father, and I was very interested in what this design potentially implied. Then, as I looked through the pages of the novel again, I realized that a super similar image appears on the bottom of page 16, accompanied by the text “he used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not.” (The cover for my edition of the novel) Even though the family is relatively in the same position and their clothes and expressions are the same, we now get a wider version of the shot and discover that Bruce is the one taking this picture. I was again immediately interested in the specific