BREAKING THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PACT: TRUTH AND LIFE-WRITING IN ALISON BECHDEL’S FUN HOME

Abstract

Much of the focus on truth in critical responses to the novel has surrounded the use of archival evidence and the access to truth provided by the graphic medium. This article will explore these issues as well as the relationship to truth established by the text’s metafictional devices and interactions with genre, particularly the genre of the Bildungsroman. This article will analyse the commentary the text provides not just on its own relationship to truth, but the role of truth in autobiographical texts in general, and in women’s and other marginalised groups’ autobiographical texts in particular. In the context of a critical landscape in which the veracity of autobiographical work by women is often subject to skeptical criticism, this article will argue that Fun Home acts, not as an exception to the genre of autobiography, but as a commentary on gap between the presumed autobiographical pact and the historical, political, and aesthetic reality of autobiographical works.