Fun Home By Alison Bechdel

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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

"My numbness, along with all the mealy-mouthed mourning, was making me irritable. What would happen if we spoke the truth?"

These are a quick few sentences from the main narration of the story (it's written as a graphic novel). Mealy-mouthed is another, more dramatic way to say afraid of speaking frankly or being straightforward. There is also the use of consonance with the phrase mealy-mouthed mourning...making me, that sudden use of M words. Mealy-mouthed is rather hard to read over, it trips you up within the sentence and given the feel of this quick aside, it's like the character is spitting out the words sound incredibly annoyed. Especially considering how frustrated she seems to be with the mourning process overall. The writer uses an erotema at the end, the rhetorical question of "What if we spoke the truth?" She's asking the reader to question what would really happen if they simply spoke the truth, rather than being mealy-mouthed. She's almost daring someone to say tell the truth at this point.