Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel.
Apparently this has been a very popular graphic novel, making it onto regular bestseller charts. Now that I no longer work in a bookstore, I rarely have any idea what's selling well, but Amazon recommended this to me and I bought it. It's actually a memoir of Alison Bechdel's childhood to age nineteen, when her father died. I loved this book so much I tried to read it slowly, and I was sorry to finish it. The drawings are fantastic -- Bechdel has a good sense of the way the human body works, and the movement of her characters is so realistic. The aging of the characters is also remarkable -- you can really see the difference between Alison at three and five. It's not really in color -- just lines of black and white shaded with green.

The story is remarkable -- Bechdel's family ran a funeral home and her father meticulously restored their Victorian house, setting up Alison's comparison between the Bechdels and the Addams family. Through the course of the book Bechdel realizes she is gay, and discovers that her father is too. (This is not giving too much away -- it's on the book jacket, and Bechdel's circular style means that events reappear throughout the narrative, evaluated in different ways.) I love how literary it is, and how collage-like: Bechdel discusses her father in terms of The Great Gatsby, plays by Oscar Wilde, and Ulysses, among other books. (Her father also taught high school English.) She includes sections of term papers, letters, and the journal she started when she was ten years old. As a "careful archivist of [my] own life" myself, I really related to Bechdel's obsessiveness about journaling, and to her odd family overall. One caution, if this sort of thing bothers you: there's some fairly explicit nudity/sex, but it's not a big part of the book. This was by far one of the best books I've read this year.

April 16, 2007