Alison Bechdel's Suicide Essay

While there is no concrete proof, like a suicide note, that her father killed himself, Alison Bechdel does point out numerous key pieces of evidence to support her theory that it was premeditated. The first being that two weeks before he got killed by the bread truck, her mother had requested a divorce from her father. This situation could have completely unraveled Bruce because his pseudo-perfect family life was in danger of falling apart and he didn’t know how to cope with this. Another key factor was Bruce was reading Albert Camus’ A Happy Death at the time of his demise. Bechdel felt that kept “leaving it around the house in what might be construed as a deliberate manner” (27). Bruce even highlighted an interesting passaged in which it talks about “the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love- first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage (28).

Alison feels that she has a connection to her father’s death because she feels that her decision to come out to her parents as a lesbian may have provoked his plans to kill himself. On page 59, Alison says that her father’s death came “so hard on the heels of this doleful coming-out party, I could not help but assume a cause-and-effect relationship”. I don’t believe

His life was one big lie and he felt for, whatever reason, he couldn’t live it the way he truly wanted to. He was a closeted gay man that also had an attraction to underage boys. His fabricated life was falling apart and he felt like he had no control over the direction it was going. The fact that he had highlighted key passages from Camus’ book seems relatively obvious as well as the fact that he died at the same age as his favorite author, F. Scott Fitzgerald. In reality, Bruce was probably trying to find a way out of his miserable fictitious life and the Sunbeam Bread truck just happened to be the answer to his