Young Alison plays airplane with her father, balancing on his upraised feet in a game she later calls Icarian.

Alison reveals that her father died when she was almost twenty, struck by a truck.

Bruce and Helen return to Pennsylvania after his father's heart attack, and Bruce takes over the family's part-time funeral business.

The Bechdel children spend time playing and doing chores at the funeral home, which the family affectionately calls the 'fun home.'

Alison learns of her father's death while away at college, finding the news incomprehensible despite her childhood proximity to death.

Alison comes out as a lesbian to her parents in a letter sent from college.

Alison's mother tells her that Bruce had affairs with men, including the family's babysitter Roy.

Alison joins the campus gay alliance and meets Joan, her first girlfriend, who later attends Bruce's funeral with her.

Young Alison vacations at the Jersey Shore with her father, her brothers, and the babysitter Roy.

Helen performs as Lady Bracknell in a local production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.

Alison gets her first period during the same pivotal summer her father is attending court-ordered therapy.

Bruce attends court-ordered psychiatric sessions after being charged with providing alcohol to a teenage boy.

As a high school senior, Alison enrolls in her father's English class and bonds with him over literature.

Bruce tries to take Alison to a gay bar, but they are turned away because she is under twenty-one.

The book ends on a memory of young Alison jumping into a pool where her father waits with outstretched arms to catch her.

Fun Home centers on Alison Bechdel's complicated relationship with her father Bruce, a closeted gay man who died in what she believes was a suicide. The story begins in childhood with small moments of physical closeness, while simultaneously revealing Bruce's hidden life as a man who had sex with teenage boys. As Alison grows up, both she and her father navigate their queerness separately, though their paths diverge sharply: Alison comes out openly while Bruce remains trapped in secrecy. The events in this pool track the main arc of their lives, from Alison's early childhood through Bruce's death and her subsequent discoveries about who he really was. After Bruce dies, Alison pieces together the truth through her mother, her memories, and the brief connection she and her father managed to forge over books and their shared queer identity. The pool ends where the book ends: a quiet image of father and daughter together in a swimming pool, one of the few moments of genuine physical tenderness between them.

The major milestones of Alison and Bruce's intertwined lives.

Bruce obsessively restores the family's Gothic Revival home, enlisting his children as helpers in every project.

Bruce teaches a young Alison to drive a riding lawnmower while he turns away to tend the garden alone.

In the days before his death, Bruce is reading Camus's novel A Happy Death.

Bruce and Helen spend the first year of their marriage in West Germany during his U.S. Army service.

Alison and her brothers repeatedly ask their grandmother to tell the story of Bruce getting stuck in mud as a boy.

Alison visits her father's grave alone and reflects that he was stuck in the mud for good this time.

Helen and Bruce meet in college while both performing in a production of The Taming of the Shrew.

Bruce woos Helen with passionate love letters from Germany but erupts into violent tantrums after she arrives to marry him.

Alison, her brothers, and their father go on a camping trip with Bruce's male friend and yardwork assistant Bill.

Young Alison writes a poem about springtime; her father improvises a second stanza that overwhelms her creative confidence entirely.

Bruce scolds young Alison for coloring a caravan the wrong color in a Wind in the Willows coloring book.

The funeral home receives three corpses from a car crash on the same road where Bruce will later die.

Alison convinces a friend to dress up in men's clothes and briefly pretend to be men together.

Alison's mother confides that she wants a divorce when Alison returns home for the holidays after coming out.

Bruce gives Alison a copy of Colette's autobiography before she comes out, and later admits a vague identification with its sapphic themes.

This pool covers the secondary events that fill in the rich, complicated history of the Bechdel family, from Bruce and Helen's troubled courtship to the rituals and tensions of everyday life. Bruce's obsessive home restoration and emotionally withholding parenting created a household that functioned more like a museum than a family, a dynamic illustrated through small moments like scolding Alison for coloring incorrectly. The pool also traces Helen's history — how she met Bruce, and how their marriage slowly crumbled under the weight of his repression and volatility — as well as Alison's own childhood struggles with creativity and identity. The middle events sit in the busy summer of Alison's pubescence, where family dysfunction and personal awakening collided against the backdrop of Watergate and local theater. By the end, Alison has grown into a young woman returning home with her girlfriend, while her mother quietly prepares to leave a marriage that has been falling apart for decades. The final image of Bruce giving Alison Colette's autobiography captures his lifelong habit of communicating through books rather than words.

The family history and quiet moments that build the texture of the Bechdel story.

Alison describes her father as appearing to be an ideal husband and father while secretly having sex with teenage boys.

Alison characterizes herself as Spartan to her father's Athenian, introducing the book's central theme of their fundamental opposition.

Alison reflects that there is no proof her father killed himself, since his death was officially ruled an accident.

Alison and her brother John greet each other with uncontrollable grins at their father's funeral, unable to access grief.

Bruce regularly invites promising male students to spend time with him in his home library, a habit that is likely sexual in some cases.

Alison discovers her lesbianism through clandestine, solitary research into books by and about queer women.

Joan accompanies Alison home for Bruce's funeral, and Helen insists on gifting Joan a book of Wallace Stevens poems from Bruce's collection.

Alison discovers a photograph of Roy the babysitter lying shirtless in bed, hidden inside a family photo envelope labeled 'family.'

The Bechdel family visits Manhattan, and Alison experiences New York City for the first time, exploring the neighborhood near where the Stonewall Riots had recently occurred.

Alison and her brothers encounter a massive snake while camping with their father, prompting Alison to later reflect on its symbolism.

Two days before Bruce dies, Alison dreams of trying to show him a sunset.

Alison identifies her own OCD at age ten by reading her mother's Dr. Spock childrearing book.

Young Alison privately refers to both masturbation and menstruation using the single code word 'Ning' in her diary.

Alison and her father briefly discuss their shared childhood gender nonconformity and queer experiences, though very little is directly said.

Alison reads James Joyce's Ulysses in college and recognizes parallels between the Stephen-Bloom relationship and her unspoken bond with her father.

This pool focuses on the moments of revelation, confrontation, and self-discovery that reshape Alison's understanding of both herself and her father. From the very first chapters, Alison frames the book as an investigation — into Bruce's hidden life, his possible suicide, and the ways the two of them eerily mirror each other. Each revelation deepens the portrait of a man unable to reconcile his inner life with the performance he put on for the world. Meanwhile, Alison's own journey toward self-knowledge takes a very different shape: she discovers her sexuality through solitary research, finds community, and begins to live openly in ways her father never could. The turning points in this pool are often quiet — a photograph found in an envelope, a code word in a diary, a dream two days before a death — but each one cracks open a new layer of meaning in the memoir. By the end, Alison has found in James Joyce's Ulysses a framework for understanding the unspoken and unresolvable bond between herself and her father.

The discoveries and emotional shifts that define Alison's understanding of her father and herself.