"he was there to catch me when I leapt"
The last line of the Fun Home states, "But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt. I found this line interesting - not only as a line to end on, which adds so much significance to it, but as a line to include at all - it takes her relationship with Bruce Bechdel from a very mixed bag of unpleasant childhood experiences and harsh realities of the adult world, to a perhaps not positive but at least consistent one that helped Alison as she changed. This got me thinking about the two of them - specifically, how he influenced the course of her life, and I started to understand the last line of the book to be, somewhat indirectly, true. Alison's father's role as an antihero shaped her and her personality, often times by challenging her and her worldviews and being a force to push back against. His stifling personality was a tool Alison used to carve her own free and expressive character from. One instance...