Fun Home Shenanigans
Alison and her brothers, John and Christian, grew up playing in the Fun Home, their family's funeral home. They spent time around coffins, open graves, and mourning families, among other things. Alison even recalls spending nights at the Fun Home with her grandmother. As such, Alison and her brothers developed an irregular reaction towards death, and especially towards mourning with death. Having spent hours upon hours with dead people, death comes differently. Thus when their father dies, they don't respond to hearing of his death as most would. They laugh.
Alison's laugh shocks many of the characters in the book, and why shouldn't it? Typically you don't expect someone to bend over with laughter while telling you their dad was hit by a truck. And yet, that's how Alison reacts. She has a similar reaction when she meets her brother Christian shortly after her dad's death. They just stare at each other and smile oddly. It's a noticeably off-setting interaction caused by the death of their father, a now-dead person whom actually means someone to them, unlike the hundreds of corpses they saw in childhood. Not once do we see Alison react as we might upon hearing of our own father's death. She doesn't sink to the ground in tears, nor pull her girlfriend in close for a hug and a cry, nor call up her family and sadly comfort them. Instead, she seems to show next to no emotions at all, save for when she laughs or smiles somewhat maniacally.
Death is such a familiar topic to Alison that you'd expect her to handle it with ease, but yet it seems as if Alison has never quite experienced the death of someone close to her. Now, I'm not saying that she should have, but by the time most people get to college I would assume they've been to at least one funeral of someone close to them, which just makes Alison's reactions even weirder. She goes into a weird sort of shock at first, being very calm to tell people that her dad was hit by a truck initially before finally breaking character with Christian. He seems to feel similarly to her, as they both look unnerved at how their father has joined the ranks of the dead.
I believe that Alison's childhood experiences in the Fun Home led her to create an unusual relationship with death, to the point where when someone close to her dies, she doesn't know how to react.
Great post! I like how you explored this-- the book offhandedly mentioned this effect, but didn't really go into detail. I think that also part of the reason Alison and Christopher react the way they do is because of their relationship with Bruce (which was complicated--he wasn't a particularly good person, but he was their dad). If someone else close to them died then I think they might have had a different reaction (although their childhood proximity to death would still make them calmer than most people is my guess).
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that it seems like Alison's proximity to death from such a young age had a pretty significant effect on how she handled the death of Bruce. I think she said at one point in the book that they eventually took a "cavalier" attitude toward the fun home so maybe thinking about that also changed what she thought about Bruce's death. I do agree that her reaction is pretty shocking to the other characters though considering that they probably had a much different experience with death growing up.
ReplyDeleteI think you make a great point but I'd have to disagree with you (partially) because I think that death is a weird thing to handle and I don't think there's anything anyone can do to handle it with 'grace'. I don't think there really is a specific emotion someone can make themselves feel when someone close to them passes. But with that same point I do think Allison's reaction was quite unusual.
ReplyDeleteI've never really thought much about what Alison's reaction to her dad's death really meant, but your post brings a lot of questions to mind. I feel like Alison's reaction has more to do with her relationship with her dad than with her experiences in the funeral home. At some points, she considered the possibility that it was a suicide and that her dad couldn't live with the fact that she opened up about her sexuality and he didn't. Perhaps she finds the reasoning of the death somewhat funny, or maybe she's trying to hide her true feelings of the matter, putting on her own mask. Interesting post.
ReplyDeleteAlison's nervous, inarticulate laugh when trying to speak of the absurd and suddent death of her father nicely reflects the tension in the book's title itself: there's a discomfiting blend of "funny" and "funeral" that has something to do with her desensitization to death as a kid who "grew up in" a funeral home. And there's also the strange joke-like irony of their father now being a "client" at his own business. But it's not as if she actually finds these events and their implications *funny*--laughter can reflect a wide range of emotions, many of them inarticulate and inarticulable, and we're all familiar with the idea of "nervous laughter." I think of Jason, as Ross is in his face with his ham-breath attacking Jason for going to the movies with his mother, and he finds himself smiling, as if he's "in on" the joke. There's literally nothing he can do in this moment to blunt the inevitable assault, but this reflexive smile (which just inflames Ross further) strikes me as a realistic response, an inexplicable reflex born out of utter confusion and discomfort. We might view Alison's awkward smiles with her brother, or her laughter at repeating the absurd and impossible sentence about the truck and her father, in this same light.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with you! I think that being exposed to something for long periods of time really has an effect on your thoughts about it, to the point where you become unphased. In this case, It was Alison growing up around the funeral home and death. She had seen so many people go through the home and had become used to seeing death all around her, and so when it came time for her father, it seemed as though she regarded his death as just another client, which is so interesting to me.
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