Katya's Coming of Age Blog

  Unfortunately, I didn’t like Fun Home very much; something about the presentation of the story as a graphic novel didn’t really click with me. However, the one aspect I really did like is the fact that the book manages to tell a story without telling you “facts”. Instead of trying to claim that her father definitely killed himself, Alison Bechdel explored several possibilities, all the while making it clear to the readers that she believes that he did. Many autobiographies or memoires try to give a series of chronological “truths”, and given that life and relationships are never one-sided, this approach doesn’t really give us a broad picture of the story. Obviously, this story is still biased towards Bechdel’s views of her father and family in general, but she doesn’t try to shove her point of view down the reader’s throats, and instead, she lets them explore the evidence themselves and decide what to believe. This works in this situation because the family dynamics are so comp...

  For this blog post, I want to talk about the difference between Dr. Gordon and Dr. Nolan. It’s obvious to the readers that Esther respects Dr. Nolan and despises Dr. Gordon, so for this blog post I want to go deeper into the reasons behind this.             From the very first time Esther met Dr. Gordon, she said that “I hated him the minute I walked in through the door” (128). The first most, obvious reason for this is that he is a man. Esther spent all of the novel up until that point questioning her place in society, as a woman. Therefore, she likely didn’t think that Dr. Gordon could relate to her struggles since men didn’t have to deal with the social expectation that they would stay at home with the children or, at most, get a job as a secretary; men were free to go into more serious careers, such as being a professor or a doctor. Additionally, her experience with men so far had been largely dismissive of her stru...