While reading Fun Home, I’ve been thinking about the fictitiousness of memoir, and in particular, graphic memoir. One avenue of my thoughts on this subject is the question of point of view. There’s a particular moment I noted on page 185, in which Bechdel draws two scenes in a row picturing her father and his court-ordered counselor. The first is straightforward—an imagining of her father arriving for his session. The second is more imaginative: the counselor’s eyebrow is made to give him a furtive look and he is adjusting his tie in what looks like nervousness. However, Bechdel never met that man. In her written sections, she writes that the idea that the two were having an affair was in the categories of “suspicions” and “tempting.” For two beats, Bechdel gives herself something of an omniscient POV, compounded by the visuals of something she never could have actually seen. Her hypothetical musings are rendered in images, not just words, and become a part of the memoir. She does the same thing on page 192-3, with her brother’s solo jaunt in New York. It includes the phrases, “When he realized,” and “Instinctively,” as if Bechdel is in his head. Again, she can take on an omniscient POV. By the end, in saying, “I shouldn’t pretend to know what my father’s [erotic truth] was” (230), there is an acknowledgment of the subjectivity of all of these omniscient truths. However, “shouldn’t” and “tempting” does not mean that Bechdel does not. Writing this memoir was an exercise in pretending to know the meanings of events rather than simple recall. The writer Bechdel has afforded her narrative self-character the omniscience that she (the author) lacks.