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Diary

Introduced halfway through Fun Home, Alison’s childhood diary serves as both a window to her past and her psyche. What begins as a simple record of daily life, meant to rid of her OCD, quickly spirals into an obsessive-compulsive ritual of recognizing and confronting her own reality. Alison becomes haunted by the fear that her written words are lies, that by simply stating "I went to the park," she is committing a lie because she cannot be 100% certain of the absolute, objective truth of the event. To cope, she begins inserting a small symbol (人) between her words to signify "I think,” in order to protect herself from being dishonest in her own narrative.

As her anxiety grows, the symbols begin to take over her diary, in a sense rewriting what she knows about her past. Alison begins to draw huge versions of the symbol all over the paper in order to save time, physically obscuring what she even says in the first place. In the beginning she notes: “Then I realized I could draw the symbol over an entire entry… Things were getting fairly illegible by August, when we had our camping trip/initiation rite at the bullpen,” but eventually noted that “My diary entries for that weekend are almost completely obscured.” I think it is a mirror to the secretive atmosphere of “Fun Home,” where her father Bruce meticulously curates a facade to hide his dark side of his life. 

Yet, I think that the diary reflects the heavy burden of being the witness of the artificiality of her family. The diary isn’t just a book of her memories, but also is a testament to the things she marked out or didn’t say. By the time she reached the end of her childhood journals, she ultimately gave up her habit of marking her symbol on them, but her entries became sparser and unreliable. “My narration had by this point become altogether unreliable.” 


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