Generational intricacies: analyzing the intertextuality relations between Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” and “Are You My Mother?”

Famous for authoring the landmark strip Dykes To Watch Out For (which spawned the often commented, and more often decontextualized, Bechdel Test), Alison Bechdel’s comic narratives possess a unique richness to them, a product of the combination of personal experiences and clever commentary on both past and contemporary topics. This is particularly palpable in the case of her two graphic memoirs, Fun Home and Are You My Mother? which heavily focus on her relationship with her father and her mother, respectively. By sharing this main theme in common, and by virtue of being biographical recounts of events that (majorly) involved the same family, both of these comics end up working in a mirror-like way to each other, which in turn generates a series of intertextual relationships (relationships established from one text referencing another) between the two of them.

Much like “traditional” (ie, text-only) memoirs do, Bechdel’s works are built on what Warhol (2011), describes as multiple diegetic levels, which can be understood as the processes through which the elements that make up a story are intertwined with the discourse devices used in order to narrate said story. In the case of autobiographies, these diegetic levels include the traditional intradiegetic level (or the “world” that contains the events that make up a story, along with its participants) and the extradiegetic level (the narrator’s point of view, from which the author, as an outsider to their own personal experiences, comments and narrates them). Due to their inherent graphic aspect, however, comic memoirs possess a third diegetic level, according to Warhol. This third level is related to the way biographical comic authors implement pictures in a way that allows readers to understand that the characters that are part of the story are less fictional entities, and more like visual avatars that are meant to be perceived as stand-ins for their real-life counterparts.

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006). It’s because of the existence of these visual avatars that readers can establish the first connection between both of these texts. Not only are many of these characters “the same” in an identitary sense (Alison, in all of her versions, remains Alison through both books, so do her parents and siblings), but all of their experiences carry over from one book to the other, often establishing a series of non-linear references that offer readers a far more detailed picture of the Bechdels and their complex family dynamics.

This non-linear aspect also constitutes one of the most defining aspects of both memoirs, which spend a good amount of pages going back and forth between childhood and adulthood. The way both books implement this narrative device allows Bechdel not only to present different points of view on recurring subjects, but this also gives her the space to revisit (and even to revise) some of the things she says as a narrator.

Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012). While it’s pretty evident that Fun Home doesn’t directly allude to Are You My Mother? (due to the latter not existing when the former was published), both works still heavily deal with the way Alison navigated growing up within her family (and the lasting impact her upbringing had on her), which makes it evident that the two of them share a deep connection with main themes.

In her paper Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Julia Watson (2008) comments on the way Bechdel’s work often crosses the line between biographical and autobiographical storytelling. The way in which both comics inevitably deal with the way her parent’s actions and attitudes directly affected Alison can also be described as an exercise in intertextuality. By connecting auto and biographical in Fun Home, Bechdel openly recognizes the negatives behind many of her father’s actions (and the impact they had oh her family), while also coming to terms with the generational — and personal — overlap between his and her own identity.

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006). This particular aspect of the memoir reaches its climax in a scene that sees Bechdel admitting to her attempts at reclaiming her father (specifically wanting him to be “gay” in the way she is “gay”, and not something else), all while also openly recognizing his many flaws.

This blurring of personal and external narratives is taken to a deeper level in Are You My Mother? where the author presents both her and her mother’s lives as parallel texts that, though vastly different, still share a series of poignant coincidences, which allow the author to comment on the ways hers and her mother’s identities as women manage to simultaneously be vastly different and surprisingly similar at times. In the words of Watson (2008), Bechdel’s narratives are a “split between a solo story, Bechdel’s child narrator Alison’s development of an “I,” and the domestic ethnography of the family, punningly presented as both artistic and autistic”.

Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012). Though Watson’s paper focuses on Fun Home, the previous quote of hers perfectly describes the way both of Bechdel’s works go into detail about not only her own personal experiences (both as a child and as an adult) but also about those of her parents (whether or not these involved her), in order to present the reader with a series of personal narratives (often contained in texts that existed before the memoirs, such as letters or journals) that reference each other, ultimately converging in two memoirs that not only offer detailed vignettes of the Bechdel marriage but also offer the reader a clear picture of the way growing with both of her parents ended up affecting Alison’s adult life.

The convergences and differences between Alison’s and both of her parents’ identities not only allow the author to paint a far more detailed picture of their personalities and relationships, but they also evidence a trait shared by the three Bechdels: the influence academic spaces had in their lives. As it happens with Dykes, neither Fun Home nor Are You My Mother? shy away from literary allusions, with both cases making use of intertextuality to comment on what can be considered main themes in both memoirs.

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006). In letters addressed to both of her parents, as it happens in correspondence exchanged between the two of them, it also becomes apparent that the Bechdels frequently communicate by using quotes and literary references, even if the subjects their letters deal with are far from the literary plane. While this might feel like a dated custom, it is one that occasionally allows Alison to bond with her parents in what can oddly be considered some of the more candid moments in both memoirs.

Be it in the way their shared taste in literature eventually serves as a bridge between her and her father’s struggles with their own sexualities in Fun Home, or in the way Winnicott’s and Woolf’s works would give her a ground to reach a deeper understanding of the patches in her relationship with her mother, a reading of Bechdel’s works makes it apparent that many of her diegetic processes rely on intertextual relations. If one was to focus on the way these two memoirs relate to each other by means of this literary device, it would become pretty sensible to affirm Bechdel is putting a lot of effort in building her family through the processes of reading and writing, to the point of these two actions becoming a constant plot point in Are You My Mother? which often has Alison and her mother exchange dialogues that reveal their feelings regarding the fact Alison’s writing focuses on subjects and topics that are sensitive to both of them.

Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012). The academic mindset that influences her parents is clearly passed onto Alison, whose comics evidence an understanding of the world that is often filtered through reading and writing about experiences (this is, by confronting her experiences to other texts), instead of simply experiencing them.

Through the pages of her two memoirs, Bechdel presents the reader with a series of narratives that intertwine her own personal world with those of her parents, carefully crafting two texts that blur the lines between auto and regular biographies. This effort also allows the comic author to present her readers with two stories that, while still perfectly capable of working on their own, have the incredible merit of establishing a constant series of intertextual relationships that make both works way richer than they already were. In her extensive commentary on hers and her parents’ experiences, the use of different kinds of texts as filters to her own perceptions also allows the readers to see a single experience from different angles, which in turn serves as commentary on how the things that we perceive (especially those that have a lasting impact on us) can become far more complex once they’re put under a new perspective.