Artistic alchemy

Despite the long list of flaws Allison Bechdel sees in her father, she can find some admirable qualities in him, including his talent for transformation. The most obvious example of this ability is his restoration of her childhood home, a Gothic mansion that went from lost cause to living museum. He found something rotting and decrepit, saw a spark of potential, and turned that spark into something beautiful. In a way, Allison did the same thing with her relationship with her father by writing Fun Home. She took something that could be seen as random and tragic, and over the course of two-hundred and thirty-two pages, created something cohesive and meaningful. 

In the first chapter of Fun Home, Allison writes of her father's ability to "spin garbage into gold". You could say she does the same thing with her and Bruce's relationship. That comparison might seem harsh, but when summarized, the experiences she shared with her father seem inadequate at best. As a child, she was confused by and afraid of him, and the two enjoyed only brief moments of affection. Later on, Allison begins to learn more about her father, but that understanding is accompanied by perverse truths. Finally, she starts to open up to him, and he begins to reciprocate, but the moment is unsatisfying and quickly followed by his mysterious and tragic death. When he was alive Allison barely knew him, and "ached as if he was already gone."

On that depressing note, the transformation from "garbage" to "gold" takes place after Bruce's death. In this case, "gold" doesn't mean a close father-daughter relationship. That would be difficult to create posthumously. Instead, the transformation is of Bruce from an intimidating, unknowable entity to something explainable, and maybe even understandable. Through photos, letters, and police records, Allison pieces together the course of her father's life, just like Bruce pieced together his home with wallpaper, paint, and tack hammers. Like Bruce saw a glimpse of potential in a pile of rotting wood and shingles, Allison saw a glimpse of a human in her father. But instead of a house, she used that insight to create a story that started with her father and ends, uncertainly, with her.

Allison Bechdel likely had many motivations to transform her father's life into a novel. One might've been gaining understanding, since, as she puts it, "my parents are most real to me in fictional terms". Another could've been the artistic coping techniques taught to her by the environment she grew up in, which she compares to a cold, distant artist's colony. That "artistic's colony" is where she learned to draw, and also where she witnessed and admired her father's "dazzling displays of artfulness". And whether it was taught, observed, or hereditary, Allison picked up her father's gift for transformation and used it to create Fun Home, a beautiful look at a deeply flawed family.