Of all the “synchronicities” (154) popping up in the summer described throughout chapter 6, Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Ernest is deployed to make sense of Alisons’ parents’ marriage and to provide a narrative reframing of Fun Home as a whole. The Importance  is a  play directed (albeit snickeringly) against the social conventions of the late victorian era that begins with two main characters revealing their double lives and ends with them realizing that their fictionalized personas were actually factual. Surely, it’s no coincidence that Fun Home is labeled a “tragicomic” while Wilde subtitled his play “a trivial play for serious people”.  The novel as a whole exists along a tension between the parts of her past that strike her as tragedy or “old catastrophe” and her impulse to identify comedic ironies along with the dramatic ones; ultimately, these two poles are distinguished as such through chronological reordering and thematization within chapters and it is impossible to situate it within either camp definitively. It is especially worth noting that Bechdel’s own narrational style and sense of narrative evolve or re-focus depending on what writer or work of fiction she is in conversation with. Just as F. Scott Fitzgerald brought out a dour and apt comparison to her father’s frustrated double life, so does the engagement with Wilde draw out a more light-hearted and humorous approach to her own family’s contradictions and subjection to social morays (See the not so subtle innuendo in the first panel of 167). Is it fair to say, then, that authors engaging in  in conversation with other works (even just at the level of allusion?) can be influenced and refocused in the same way that characters and narratives-shape one another reciprocally?