Fun Home pages 22-23

On page 20, Alison begins to talk about the quality of parenting that she received from her father. More specifically Alison mentions his presence throughout their relationship and her life as he was living. We see that her father was always around and this is told to us by the text provided along with the images. Her father constantly puts her and her siblings to work with him doing various chores and tasks. While Alison and her father are physically close, we also see that they could not be further apart as far as a conventional, “proper”, father/daughter relationship goes. On page 22 and 23 the images and the text work in perfect harmony to show us how truly self-absorbed her father was even in their private moments where they would be expected to be bonding. Right off the bat we see her father enter the scene riding on the back of the mower shirtless. He is constantly working to model his concept of perfection while excluding his own family from his life even as they are present. While he may be teaching her to mow and complete lawn care tasks, he is also trying to appear as an icon of perfection as he leans on the mower positioning his body in an appealing way for whomever it may interest. Her father goes as far as wearing cologne to work I the ward because he needs to be able feel better than your average father who works in the yard and ends up stinking, naturally, later on. The bottom line is that her father was always there but no matter how close they were, he was never really present in the moment. A powerful example of this is the image that goes along with the text reading like so, "amputees feel pain in a missing limb", as her father is front and center while she is nothing but a shadow in the background as she has always been during the course of her  childhood.