Fun Home by Alison Bechdel - Blog 2 "The House"

"But over the next eighteen years, my father would restore the house to its original condition, and then some. He would perform, as Daedalus did, dazzling display of artfulness. He would cultivate the barren yard into a lush, flowering landscape. He would manipulate flagstones that weighed half a ton and the thinnest, quivering layers of a gold leaf. It could have been a romantic story like in "It's A Wonderful Life", when Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed fix up that big old house and raise their family there. But in the movie when Jimmy Stewart comes home one night and starts yelling at everyone it's out of the ordinary. Daedalus, too, was indifferent to the human cost of his projects."

The family house not only provides the title of the memoir but it is the center of the family. Alison's father is obsessed with fixing up an old home for them to live in, and he makes the journey of rebuilding and redecorating this home more important than anything else in his life. The home is supposed to be a place of comfort, of rest, and of family, but through her father's struggles to finish the home and make it better than it ever was actually results in a family that does not want to be around him. There was always work to be done in the home and he made sure that his children were there to help him. Wether they were told to clean, fix, assist, or put away his children despised the home for it's great deal of effort necessary to make it what it was. But Alison's father made sure to create something beautiful from something ugly and his pure passion for it's completion seemed to have struck Alison. As the quote above explains, her father paid no mind to the pain and turmoil his remodeling caused his family. He would be aggressive and angry when things no longer went his way, making the home a place of discomfort and terror instead of love and security.

"And of course, my brothers and I were free labor. Dad considered us extensions of his own body, like precision robot arms."

This act left his children to despise the house they grew up in. It made them not want to come home and inevitably drove them out. Because their father's passion was not shared by all, the family was distraught and no longer connected.