“Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?” –Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
When third generation funeral director Bruce Bechdel stepped to his death into the path of a Sunbeam delivery truck, either by accident or intentionally, no one thought his family’s story would be a bestselling book and an award winning musical.
His daughter Alison thought their story needed to be told. Her 2006 memoir Fun House went on to be a New York Times bestseller and was made into a musical which just won five Emmys on Broadway.
“Fun House” was her family’s nickname for the Bechdel Funeral Home of Beech Creek, Pennsylvania. The rural town (population ranging from 670-750) made funeral directing a part-time job. Bruce Bechdel, who assumed the duties of the family business when his father died in 1963, was also a high school English teacher. He was a lover of literature, an authority in Victorian architecture, an accomplished genealogist, an aspiring bon vivant and a closeted homosexual.
The core of her chronicle is her relationship with her father from a young age to his death at age 44, by the “canary caravan of death” (the delivery truck), when she was a college student. Their troubled bond culminated when she told her parents that she was a lesbian. He died two weeks later, crossing a rural highway, clearing brush at a house he was restoring. Alison stays convinced that he intentionally ran in front of the vehicle while others, including the driver, contend it was a tragic accident.
Her mother was an actress and a writer who did not give Alison much solace as she rebelled against flowered wall paper in her room and frilly dresses, preferring more masculine, or at least gender neutral things. Her father sought to keep her as feminine as possible. These issues set up the complicated family dynamics as her brothers, Christian and John, are relatively minor players in her book.
Alison is an accomplished cartoonist and her biography is told in comic form. Some of the depictions of family vacations are painstakingly drawn to look like photographs. Portions of letters and writing are also realistically recreated.
Though the funeral home aspect is not the main focus, she does recall playing in caskets, helping vacuum and clean and her father showing her a young cousin and another man on the embalming table.
She comes across as a willful and ungrateful child as she constantly battles her father. Alison becomes aware of her homosexuality and begins to suspect her father’s behaviors. Her mother does not go with the family on vacations but Bruce is always accompanied by a young male “babysitter”. A trip on the Fourth of July to Greenwich Village in New York opened her eyes to the areas her father took their family. Years later, her mother told her of her father’s affair with “Roy”, the babysitter they knew so well.
When she “came out” to her father, he reluctantly confessed some same sex experiences which Alison took as a new level of positive communication. Her mother, who seemingly knew of her husband’s other life for years, asked Bruce for a divorce shortly afterwards. Then Bruce died under the delivery truck. A sense of guilt is felt in Alison’s story as she just had a dream where she tried to show her father a beautiful sunset; but it was gone when he looked.
Alison is not kind to funeral service as she describes his appearance in the casket. “My father could have used a barber, His face was rough and dry, scraped clean with no help from the expensive lotions and aftershaves in the silver tray in his bathroom at home.”
She contemplates a funeral director’s death: “All the years spent visiting gravediggers, joking with burial vault salesman and teasing my brothers with crushed vials of smelling salts only made my own father’s death more incomprehensible.”
During his funeral, listening to the platitudes bestowed upon him, she wanted to scream out: “He killed himself because he was a manic-depressive, closeted fag and he couldn’t face living in this small-minded town one more second!”
Her father was an Army veteran, a flag and holder was placed on his grave at Hays-Fearon Cemetery. “I javelined this ugly brass holder and all into the cornfield that immediately adjoins his plot at the edge of the cemetery.” She doesn’t explain her reason.
The book was banned as pornography in Marshall, Missouri (there are depicted scenes of intimate lovemaking that are unnecessary). In 2008, it was an issue of contention at the University of Utah. In Charleston, South Carolina, the Palmetto Family, a conservative group affiliated with Focus On Family, protested its inclusion as a reading selection for incoming freshman. When civil liberty groups fought them, the college received a funding cut of $52,000. After a lengthy and contentious battle, the funding was restored but only to the study of the US Constitution and the Federalist Papers.
The book has been translated in many languages worldwide.
Bechdel’s book was made into a musical in 2013 with lyrics by Lisa Kron and scored by Jeanine Tesori. It played off Broadway until April 2015. The production earned a dozen Emmy nominations and won five Emmys including Best Musical. One of the actresses portraying Alison (age 10) won an Obie Award, the youngest actress to win an Obie.
It also won or was nominated for many other awards including Lucille Loren Awards, New York Drama Critic’s Award, Outer Critics Award, Drama League Award, and the Drama Desk Award. It was nominated for six Tony Awards.
The book and the musical do not denigrate funeral service, but Alison does not show any respect for it. The story is an interesting glimpse into a dysfunctional family.
What brought father and daughter together in the end was what kept them apart during their lives.
“I was Spartan to my father’s Athenian; Modern to his Victorian; Butch to his nelly; Utilitarian to his aesthete.” –Alison Bechdel