Fun Home

Fun home : a family tragicomic / Alison Bechdel.— Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2007.
232 p. : ill ; 23 cm.
ISBN: 9780618871711

1. Bechdel, Alison -- Comic books, strips, etc. 2. Cartoonists -- United States -- Comic books, strips, etc. 3. Fathers and daughters -- Comic books, strips, etc.

741.5973

Bechdel's memoir of growing up with her closeted gay father in rural Pennsylvania, where her parents taught English, and father worked in the family funeral home, or “Fun Home” as she and her brothers referred to it, might be characterized as tragi-ironic, more than tragicomic. It’s a melancholy childhood of family secrets and alienation. It’s the story of her father’s death—was it a suicide or an accident—and of her relationship to him.

It’s constructed as a series of chapters that are meditative revelations, each one building on and revealing more than the previous one. Each one uses a different work of literature and its author as the reflecting mirror for her family life: the Greek myth of Icarus and his father Deadalus, A Happy Death by Albert Camus, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or as she translates it, “this means not just lost but ruined, undone, wasted, wrecked, and spoiled” (page 119), The Wind in the Willows, “The Ideal Husband” and “The Importance of Being Ernest” by Oscar Wilde, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Homer’s original. Her reason for this abundance of literary references, she explains after comparing her father to a character in an F. Scott Fitzgerald book and her mother to one “right out of Henry James,” (page 66) “I employ these allusions to James and Fitzgerald not only as descriptive devices, but because my parents are most real to me in fictional terms. And perhaps my cool aesthetic distance itself does more to convey the Arctic climate of our family than any particular literary comparison.” (page 67)

Part of the irony is that she learned of her father’s hidden sexuality, only as a result of her coming out to her parents as a lesbian when she was in college only four months before he died. A few weeks after her letter home, her mother, not her father, called to tell her about it. Instead of an opportunity to talk about a common experience, it became another instance of their antipodal relationship. As she puts it earlier in the book, “I was Spartan to my father’s Athenian. Modern to his Victorian. Butch to his Nelly. Utilitarian to his Aesthete.” (page 15).

Yet the book begins and ends with scenes of her father catching her as she leaps into his arms. She has said that she is not angry with her father, although her affection for him reveals itself more clearly in her interviews with the press, than in the book. Her statement there is, “His bursts of kindness were as incandescent as his tantrums were dark.” (page 21)

This is a highly lauded book that deserves every bit of its praise. Fun Home is a masterpiece of memoir drawn in black and white cartoons tinted in shades of blue.