Compared to other genres, Graphic memoirs offer both the textual and visual representations of the relationship between a moment of significance in the author's life and the effective as well as affective construction of that memory for the reader. This duality is why McCloud describes the work of meaning transmission between the author and the reader as a dance between "the seen and the unseen." My aim in this paper is to ascertain the impact of using graphic conventions on the effective and affective construction of meaning and identity in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) and how the use of "The Gutter" from a comic's visual structure becomes of even more significance in graphic memoirs. I aim to show that despite the use of panels, which at times can fracture the flow of the narrative into sequenced segments, it is in the alternating of the textual/visual with the blank spaces of the gutters that the narrative comes alive for the reader. These blank spaces, in Cvetkocich's view, are meant to represent an effort to redefine the "connections between memory and history, private experience and public life" via a written account and the "act of witness" represented by a combination of the visual and the verbal. Using this mix of image and text, Bechdel creates an almost palimpsestic effect as a majority of the panels in Fun Home show items layered over other images, indicating a blending between the narrative of Bechdel's real life experience and the representation of that life experience in the text. For the reader, this implies a way to address the gaps in knowledge not only for them, but also for Bechdel herself, making the reader a participant observer of the memories within the narrative and not one who is always standing outside it.