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.”
I think it is interesting how you illustrate a parallel between Bruce's curation of his appearance and Alison's doubt of her own memory of events. Both are compulsively trying to make up for what they see as their flaws, and in doing so they are alienating themselves and the people around them. I also think it is interesting how she stopped drawing the symbol around the same time she began to become more comfortable with herself and her identity.
ReplyDeleteJason, I love the sentence, "I think that the diary reflects the heavy burden of being the witness of the artificiality of her family." It captures a sentiment that relates to Fun Home in general; this artificiality produced primarily by Bruce creates a stark difference with Alison's honest narrative of something so incredibly personal, and that narrative Alison presents oftentimes is clearly difficult to relate in the book. So I love that the diary and the novel have the same general sentiment (a frame narrative?!). Once Alison becomes more biased, and, in her words, "altogether unreliable," I wonder if that is the version of Fun Home we are reading. As we grow, do we become more biased or less? Great blog post!
ReplyDeleteHi Jason, I love this blog. The diary was definitely a crucial part in the novel that reflected Alison's internal emotional journey as she was forced to navigate through Bruce's secrets being unraveled and her family being unraveled as well. I found Alison's use of a symbol to replace "I think" to be something that truly reflects Alison's view on the objective truth and on reality as she isn't truly sure what to believe anymore. Awesome blog Jason!
ReplyDeleteHi Jason, great blog post! I really liked your description and analysis of Alison's diary. Though it seems like a relatively trivial thing (it's just a book where she writes down what happened in her day), I agree with you that it deeply reflects her psyche. Because she doesn't really know what is real or not in her family, the symbol she writes reflects the unreliability in which she views the true nature of her household.
ReplyDeleteIt might seem really obvious to view the diary--in the midst of an autobiographical narrative that is reconstructing the past that the diary presumably reflects and documents--as something like a "first draft" of this book, or primary source-material for the narrative and illustrations. But instead it becomes a plot element within that story, part of Alison's characterization, and a larger reflection of the ambiguities surrounding representation of fact and truth. I'm always struck by the seemingly uncontroversial nature of the statements that young Alison feels the need to qualify--you'd have to go pretty deep into epistemological skepticism to get into doubts about whether or not she "really" went to the park on a day where she went to the park. She isn't putting this mark over interpretive or speculative reflections--it's like she starts to doubt the stability of reality itself. This is most apparent in her rendering of the incident with Roy and the snake--a key moment in the present narrative, in which she sees all kinds of symbolic resonance, but the diary tells almost nothing about the event or her feelings around it.
ReplyDeleteWe end up with a picture of an author who is remarkably comfortable with uncertainty and speculation, no longer worried about qualifying her statements. And yet, we can view the entirety of _Fun Home_ and especially everything to do with her father and his death as having a giant "I think" hovering over them. There's so much in this book that she simply does not KNOW.
Hi,
ReplyDeleteI think that the I think being due to the falsity of the family is an interesting idea. And how it might stem from bruce and the artificiality of the house. But I think it might also have something to do with the amount of perfectionism Bruce goes through when it comes to the house. Because it does seem to be a bit of perfectionism in the marking of things Alison can't know for sure. Because even if it seems pretty obvious, how can you be perfectly certain it is perfectly true. The diary is a record of what happened, and if you can't 100% absolutely certain of something, then you need to mark it as such so you don't write down a lie. But you can never be totally certain of something, so everything must be marked.
Hi Jason,
ReplyDeleteI found this part of the book really unique and illuminating. When I read it for the first time, I was inspired by Alison's creativity in coming up with that symbol to solve her problem of being overconfident in her perceptions of the world, but as the story progressed, it became clear that maybe the creation of the symbol allowed her to dwell more and more on her uncertainty (and it became like a shortcut to generally gaslighting herself). I didn't draw the connection between this episode and her father's self-editing, so I'm glad you brought that up (perhaps he had OCD but expressed it with his aesthetic obsessions).
Hi Jason!
ReplyDeleteI really liked the connection you made between Alison's diary and the facade Bruce plays to hide the hidden aspects of his life, and how they both play into the secretiveness of the whole narrative. I hadn't thought of it like that! I always just thought of the diary as something that was meant to help Alison's OCD, and ended up making it worse as she begins to obsessively write down the symbol. Maybe it could have been a reference for the book itself.
Hi Jason,
ReplyDeleteI really liked how you were able to connect the illegibility of Alison's diary to her situation with her family. This pastime that was supposed to be a safe haven for her to express her feelings became something that even she couldn't understand. The symbol that she created started off as a way of protecting herself, but eventually took over her writing, making her entries unreliable unable to read. Great blog!
Hi Jason, nice blog. The diary was a really interesting part of the book that spoke to the self-consciousness of Alison and her relationship with her dad. As a result of her dad, Alison doesn't know what is true and real, creating the use of the I think symobl.
ReplyDeleteHey Jason! I thought it was great that you included the significance of the curvy symbol in her diary and how that changed throughout the entries. It was a great way to subtly see the stress within herself and how that related to her father. The way she uses the symbol as an unconscious way to create a barrier for her mind and the outside world. It was a great blog Jason!
ReplyDeleteHey Jason! I also examined the topic of Alison's diary in my blog, and drew similar conclusions regarding the relationship between her fear of not telling the truth and Bruce's artificiality. Adding on, one interesting trend, which you briefly mention at the end of your blog, is how Alison eventually gives up the "I think" symbol in her writing. It's interesting to consider why that shift occured, and whether it was a result of simply getting older or a more distinct "coming-of-age" event. Great blog!
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