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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
In this graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father.
Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the Fun Home. It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.
Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the Fun Home. It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.
232 pages, Paperback
First published June 8, 2006
About the author
Alison Bechdel
54 books3,857 followersAlison Bechdel is an American cartoonist. Originally best known for the long-running comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, in 2006 she became a best-selling and critically acclaimed author with her graphic memoir Fun Home.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 12,973 reviews
January 12, 2021
Reading Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic put me in the same irritated and impatient mood experienced when reading Toni Morrison's The Song of Solomon in high school: both books feel like major wank-offs to the writers' cumulative reading endeavors. To put it in less crude terms, both books overflow with self-conscious references to classic literature (both use The Odyssey in a major way). However, this is not a review of The Song of Solomon, so I suppose I will set aside that grudge for now.
This is how I feel: any person, no matter how mediocre his/her life might be perceived, can be made into a great story. The key to this is good writing, and although Bechdel's writing is ORNAMENTAL, it's not engaging. She doesn't make me care about her, and I care only a little bit about her dad, whom the book focuses on. The constant literary references (Joyce, Camus, Proust, Wilde, etc) do not impress me and they do not enrich the story she is telling. Bechdel continuously draws parallels to anything and everything literary. Comparing the map in The Wind in the Willows to a map of her local terrain is one thing: comparing her first act of performing cunnilingus to entering Homer's cave of Polyphemus made me groan out loud. Bechdel also uses dictionary definitions as an ongoing motif, a cliche that ALWAYS annoys me ("'orgasm: or-gaz-um-' "what is an orgasm? what does it mean in the context of my own life? Let's examine this word and blah blah blah blah" <---bitchy paraphrasing).
I will say I have never been a fan of Dykes to Watch Out For or Alison Bechdel's drawing style in general (and my enjoyment of a comic, as is typical, is largely derived from the visual component) , so it is unfair to complain about that here;it's a matter of taste. However, if the facial expressions were rendered differently, and if Bechdel shook out the masturbatory references and word definitions, she might have sold me.
But no.
edit*** I think I'm mature enough to revisit Song of Solomon with less of a chip on my shoulder. In terms of Fun Home, I re-read it almost ten years after writing this review, hoping I would feel differently, but I don't. I've grown to appreciate Bechdel a lot, but I think she is much more successful hiding her autobiography within the fictional Dykes to Watch Out For characters. When she addresses us directly, I think she gets bogged down by self consciousness.
This is how I feel: any person, no matter how mediocre his/her life might be perceived, can be made into a great story. The key to this is good writing, and although Bechdel's writing is ORNAMENTAL, it's not engaging. She doesn't make me care about her, and I care only a little bit about her dad, whom the book focuses on. The constant literary references (Joyce, Camus, Proust, Wilde, etc) do not impress me and they do not enrich the story she is telling. Bechdel continuously draws parallels to anything and everything literary. Comparing the map in The Wind in the Willows to a map of her local terrain is one thing: comparing her first act of performing cunnilingus to entering Homer's cave of Polyphemus made me groan out loud. Bechdel also uses dictionary definitions as an ongoing motif, a cliche that ALWAYS annoys me ("'orgasm: or-gaz-um-' "what is an orgasm? what does it mean in the context of my own life? Let's examine this word and blah blah blah blah" <---bitchy paraphrasing).
I will say I have never been a fan of Dykes to Watch Out For or Alison Bechdel's drawing style in general (and my enjoyment of a comic, as is typical, is largely derived from the visual component) , so it is unfair to complain about that here;it's a matter of taste. However, if the facial expressions were rendered differently, and if Bechdel shook out the masturbatory references and word definitions, she might have sold me.
But no.
edit*** I think I'm mature enough to revisit Song of Solomon with less of a chip on my shoulder. In terms of Fun Home, I re-read it almost ten years after writing this review, hoping I would feel differently, but I don't. I've grown to appreciate Bechdel a lot, but I think she is much more successful hiding her autobiography within the fictional Dykes to Watch Out For characters. When she addresses us directly, I think she gets bogged down by self consciousness.
December 4, 2013
THIS JUST IN : P BRYANT FAILS HIP GRAPHIC NOVEL TEST
Fun Home, a cripplingly hip graphic novel, is....
Yes?
It's....
YES??
Well, let's see, it's, you know, all right, good, yes, nods head, hummphs into beard, pulls earlobe, raises eyebrows, waves hands in a vague direction, shifts about in seat. You know. Don't get me wrong. It was good. Yes. Cool, clever, really hip, I mean, really, as far as I can tell, my hipometer needs a new battery I think; it was not the least bit funny, but that's not such a bad thing, and...
Stares at ceiling.
Has sudden thought.
Hey, you don't think Alison Bechdel will read this do you, she's not one of those Goodreads authors who suddenly jump up like a damned jack in a box and scare the jesus out of you and tell you they devoted five years of hard graft to this work you've just more or less sneered at and damned with the faintest possible praise, I really hope not, that's not happened to me yet but I know it's happened to a few of you and it's not pretty, some of you were mildly traumatised, I saw it with my own eyes, you had to be led away to a quiet good place with a small cat to stroke.
So... Fun Room. It was all sweetly sad and worthy, painfully so, all about Alison's father who was this closet gay or bi living the whole of his life in a small Pennsylvanian town. So his temperament ran towards the dour and repressed and the sublimating-everything-into-his-house-restoration and then lo! shazam! Alison figures this out and also - double shazam! that she herself is gay, and then they become a lot closer and then stuff happens but not that much stuff. I wanted more stuff. I'm unreasonable.
I read books for stuff, you know.
Fun Home, a cripplingly hip graphic novel, is....
Yes?
It's....
YES??
Well, let's see, it's, you know, all right, good, yes, nods head, hummphs into beard, pulls earlobe, raises eyebrows, waves hands in a vague direction, shifts about in seat. You know. Don't get me wrong. It was good. Yes. Cool, clever, really hip, I mean, really, as far as I can tell, my hipometer needs a new battery I think; it was not the least bit funny, but that's not such a bad thing, and...
Stares at ceiling.
Has sudden thought.
Hey, you don't think Alison Bechdel will read this do you, she's not one of those Goodreads authors who suddenly jump up like a damned jack in a box and scare the jesus out of you and tell you they devoted five years of hard graft to this work you've just more or less sneered at and damned with the faintest possible praise, I really hope not, that's not happened to me yet but I know it's happened to a few of you and it's not pretty, some of you were mildly traumatised, I saw it with my own eyes, you had to be led away to a quiet good place with a small cat to stroke.
So... Fun Room. It was all sweetly sad and worthy, painfully so, all about Alison's father who was this closet gay or bi living the whole of his life in a small Pennsylvanian town. So his temperament ran towards the dour and repressed and the sublimating-everything-into-his-house-restoration and then lo! shazam! Alison figures this out and also - double shazam! that she herself is gay, and then they become a lot closer and then stuff happens but not that much stuff. I wanted more stuff. I'm unreasonable.
I read books for stuff, you know.
September 16, 2007
Having never felt much inclination toward the graphic novel genre, I accepted a copy of Fun Home by Alison Bechdel on loan only because a coworker promised that I could finish it in one hour and forty minutes--almost precisely the amount of time it would take to travel from the office to my home in Connecticut, where I had plans to spend the weekend.
One hour and fifty-five minutes later, when my mom pulled in her mini-van, I was close to the end, but not there yet. I'm a slow reader. But Fun Home is also a book that demands patient, meticulous study. I examined every illustration, looking for the visual details that Alison, a cartoonist, has tucked in, here and there. Hidden like easter eggs, there are amusing details meant to be discovered on particularly grim pages. Alison can also make the most simplistic details - Road Runner on the TV; period cars; recurring appearances of the Sun Beam Bread logo - realistic, melancholy, and heartrending all at once.
And the story itself, the misery and the humor of the characters, the events, and the time period, must be thoughtfully digested. The book is divided into seven chapters, each based on a different theme in the author's childhood and young adult life. Each one on its own could be a personal essay about overcoming an unusual hardship, but the episodes are tied together by recurring moments - the scene in which Alison learns her father's deepest darkest secret over the phone; the stack of literature on homosexuality that grows and grows on her nightstand in college; her father writing letters to her mother from his bunk during the war - and references to classic literature that are carefully, artfully implemented and never daunting.
As a memoir, Fun Home is beautifully arranged and as honest and unapologetic as they come. Alison writes and draws as if she is still putting together the pieces as she does so, and closes the book with the impression that the story is not over. Which of course, it is not, since the author, her two brothers, and their mother, all survive the father they never had and then lost. Fun Home illustrates the fact that we never truly escape the legacies of our parents and never completely outgrow our childhood experiences. Alison wrote a note in the Advance Readers Edition, which I read, in which she notes: "the actual documentary truth [as recorded in diaries, letters, clippings and photographs from her childhood] was almost always richer and more surprising than the way [she] had remembered a particular event." In Fun Home, Alison does not just explore the far reaches of her memory. She revisits it as if seeing it all happen again, literally, graphically, for the first time.
One hour and fifty-five minutes later, when my mom pulled in her mini-van, I was close to the end, but not there yet. I'm a slow reader. But Fun Home is also a book that demands patient, meticulous study. I examined every illustration, looking for the visual details that Alison, a cartoonist, has tucked in, here and there. Hidden like easter eggs, there are amusing details meant to be discovered on particularly grim pages. Alison can also make the most simplistic details - Road Runner on the TV; period cars; recurring appearances of the Sun Beam Bread logo - realistic, melancholy, and heartrending all at once.
And the story itself, the misery and the humor of the characters, the events, and the time period, must be thoughtfully digested. The book is divided into seven chapters, each based on a different theme in the author's childhood and young adult life. Each one on its own could be a personal essay about overcoming an unusual hardship, but the episodes are tied together by recurring moments - the scene in which Alison learns her father's deepest darkest secret over the phone; the stack of literature on homosexuality that grows and grows on her nightstand in college; her father writing letters to her mother from his bunk during the war - and references to classic literature that are carefully, artfully implemented and never daunting.
As a memoir, Fun Home is beautifully arranged and as honest and unapologetic as they come. Alison writes and draws as if she is still putting together the pieces as she does so, and closes the book with the impression that the story is not over. Which of course, it is not, since the author, her two brothers, and their mother, all survive the father they never had and then lost. Fun Home illustrates the fact that we never truly escape the legacies of our parents and never completely outgrow our childhood experiences. Alison wrote a note in the Advance Readers Edition, which I read, in which she notes: "the actual documentary truth [as recorded in diaries, letters, clippings and photographs from her childhood] was almost always richer and more surprising than the way [she] had remembered a particular event." In Fun Home, Alison does not just explore the far reaches of her memory. She revisits it as if seeing it all happen again, literally, graphically, for the first time.
January 3, 2014
I've known about Bechdel for some time, but I've never gotten around to reading any of her work.
Odds are, you know about her too, even if you're not aware of it. She's the one that invented the appropriately-named Bechdel Test for movies.
If you don't know about the test, it bears talking about. It's almost like a checklist:
1. Does the movie have two female characters in it?
2. Do the two female characters have at least one conversation?
3. Does at least one of their conversations concentrate on something other than a man?
If the answer to any of these is "no" you fail the test.
To me, the truly interesting thing about this test isn't how many movies utterly fail it. It's that when you're first exposed to the test, you're forced to confront how fucked up the gender bias in almost all media is.
Anyway, I picked up the comic because I was curious what her writing was like. And because it's odd to see a graphic novel that's won so much literary attention. (This book has a *ton* of awards and accolades.)
Did I like it? Yes.
It's cleverly written. Very earnest and heartfelt. It's fascinating.
Did I *lurve* it? No.
I admire the craft in the book. It was emotionally engaging without being maudlin. It was artfully constructed. It shared an experience with me that I never would have gained anywhere else. I'd happily recommend it to a lot of my friends.
But for me, that's where it stops. Enjoyment and admiration of the craft. This book is a wonderful example of: "Great books that are not perfectly targeted for me."
Now don't get me wrong. It was fascinating. Books I whole-heartedly enjoy and admire are still in the top 5%. But what really rings the bell that hangs in your heart is mostly a matter of flavor, and this one wasn't quite suited to me.
Is it worth your time? Yes.
That said, you're more likely to enjoy it if you're a recovering English major. Or if you're a fan of queer culture, autobiographical fiction, or non-superhero graphic novels.
Odds are, you know about her too, even if you're not aware of it. She's the one that invented the appropriately-named Bechdel Test for movies.
If you don't know about the test, it bears talking about. It's almost like a checklist:
1. Does the movie have two female characters in it?
2. Do the two female characters have at least one conversation?
3. Does at least one of their conversations concentrate on something other than a man?
If the answer to any of these is "no" you fail the test.
To me, the truly interesting thing about this test isn't how many movies utterly fail it. It's that when you're first exposed to the test, you're forced to confront how fucked up the gender bias in almost all media is.
Anyway, I picked up the comic because I was curious what her writing was like. And because it's odd to see a graphic novel that's won so much literary attention. (This book has a *ton* of awards and accolades.)
Did I like it? Yes.
It's cleverly written. Very earnest and heartfelt. It's fascinating.
Did I *lurve* it? No.
I admire the craft in the book. It was emotionally engaging without being maudlin. It was artfully constructed. It shared an experience with me that I never would have gained anywhere else. I'd happily recommend it to a lot of my friends.
But for me, that's where it stops. Enjoyment and admiration of the craft. This book is a wonderful example of: "Great books that are not perfectly targeted for me."
Now don't get me wrong. It was fascinating. Books I whole-heartedly enjoy and admire are still in the top 5%. But what really rings the bell that hangs in your heart is mostly a matter of flavor, and this one wasn't quite suited to me.
Is it worth your time? Yes.
That said, you're more likely to enjoy it if you're a recovering English major. Or if you're a fan of queer culture, autobiographical fiction, or non-superhero graphic novels.
December 1, 2022
Many family issues united into one big tragedy
A family of outsiders in a conservative, rural landscape
Everyone, especially daughter and father, have their problems with gender roles stereotypes they can´t live because she is a tomboy and he a feminine man. As if parent child relationships weren´t already difficult enough, this adds an underlying criticism and satire to the values a society wants to implement into all citizens.
By simply changing role models the whole concept of strictly male and female becomes even more ridiculous than it already is
In a more tolerant and open society, there may at least be no outside social problem and they could struggle just inside their home. But that alone is a problem too difficult to solve for many mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons because of
Tradition, sexual preference, upbringing, educational style, and what kind of kid parents want to have
If one isn´t into it, it´s impossible to fake forever and stay sane, consensual, and especially happy. There must be tons of people still living fake lives in stereotypical, society approved, hetero, not interracial, not of different confession, relationships, that just aren´t happy. And often, the partner doesn´t know that his wife/man is just full of fear of coming out. What do fidelity and trust mean in such toxic constellations? But at least
Tolerance, progressive new laws, and an evolving, more open society make hope for a brighter future
Besides all the other obvious atrocities humans tended and tend to do, this white hetero man sexual supremacy has caused hidden suffering of an immense range. Not just for people of other sexual orientations, but for kids and wives too, who dared to be a bit different than what social norms say. The more momentum and impact enlightenment and modern education get, the fewer unnecessary tragedies, childhood traumas, and suicides will be caused by stupid, crazy regulations of what one has to be and into what.
Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...
A family of outsiders in a conservative, rural landscape
Everyone, especially daughter and father, have their problems with gender roles stereotypes they can´t live because she is a tomboy and he a feminine man. As if parent child relationships weren´t already difficult enough, this adds an underlying criticism and satire to the values a society wants to implement into all citizens.
By simply changing role models the whole concept of strictly male and female becomes even more ridiculous than it already is
In a more tolerant and open society, there may at least be no outside social problem and they could struggle just inside their home. But that alone is a problem too difficult to solve for many mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons because of
Tradition, sexual preference, upbringing, educational style, and what kind of kid parents want to have
If one isn´t into it, it´s impossible to fake forever and stay sane, consensual, and especially happy. There must be tons of people still living fake lives in stereotypical, society approved, hetero, not interracial, not of different confession, relationships, that just aren´t happy. And often, the partner doesn´t know that his wife/man is just full of fear of coming out. What do fidelity and trust mean in such toxic constellations? But at least
Tolerance, progressive new laws, and an evolving, more open society make hope for a brighter future
Besides all the other obvious atrocities humans tended and tend to do, this white hetero man sexual supremacy has caused hidden suffering of an immense range. Not just for people of other sexual orientations, but for kids and wives too, who dared to be a bit different than what social norms say. The more momentum and impact enlightenment and modern education get, the fewer unnecessary tragedies, childhood traumas, and suicides will be caused by stupid, crazy regulations of what one has to be and into what.
Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...
December 6, 2020
Works doubly as one hugely terrific autobiography & a megaengaging graphic novel. In FUN HOME, there is a tremendous longing to merge both of these Arts. The intent is always to make print as compelling as the pictorials they are made to convey. Astute, cheeky & enthralling, it brings together disparate themes like 'Wind in the Willows" & "The Importance of Being Earnest" and "Catcher in the Rye", as well as A Chorus Line & Joyce's Ulysses: pretty much a choose-your-own-literature type adventure that possibly every single reader of this flawless book could relate to.
Ten dollars to you if the last page/frame of this doesn't make you B.O.L.*
PS: We are watching the musical this January! Oh blessed New Year!
*(Bawl Out Loud)
TOP 100
Ten dollars to you if the last page/frame of this doesn't make you B.O.L.*
PS: We are watching the musical this January! Oh blessed New Year!
*(Bawl Out Loud)
TOP 100
July 14, 2017
Family dysfunction, bow down to the Bechdel family.
Alison Bechdel's father Bruce was an enigma to her while she was growing up—an English teacher and director of the family-owned funeral home (aka the "Fun Home") who had an exacting eye for fashion, decor, and gardening. He wasn't a bad father, but he always seemed to keep her and her brothers at arm's length, not to mention her mother.
While Alison remembered some special, tender times, she remembered more moments of being forced to wear an outfit she didn't want, scolded into meeting his tough cleaning standards, and feeling bewildered at his obsession with making sure all of the flowers around their house always looked perfect.
When Alison was in college, she came out to her parents as a lesbian. Shortly thereafter, she found out that her father was gay. While perhaps not entirely surprising if she added up all of the signs and clues she might have noted subconsciously, the discovery still throws her for a loop. And while they had one half-conversation about this, a few weeks after his revelation, her father died, leaving a legacy of mystery and confusion in his wake.
"Perhaps my eagerness to claim him as 'gay' in the way I am 'gay,' as opposed to bisexual or some other category, is just a way of keeping him to myself—a sort of inverted oedipal complex."
Fun Home is both a daughter's efforts to make sense of her father's life and death as it is an account of growing up uncomfortable in your own skin, of knowing you are different but being afraid of acknowledging it for fear everything might change, even though it should. It's a story of coming to terms with who you are, while remembering a man who really never had that luxury.
I'm really late to the party in reading this, and while I've heard some of the music from the musical version of Fun Home , I never saw the show either. I've never read a graphic novel/memoir before (although I read lots of Archie, Betty, and Veronica comics growing up, and was addicted to the Silver Surfer), and this was both a refreshing and challenging format for me.
This book practically pulsates with emotion, anger, and confusion, as well as the uncertainty that comes with self-discovery. When it dealt with Alison's own life or her father's struggles to find himself, the book is strongest, but it spends a lot of time holding up their story against a backdrop of classic literature (which her father so loved), and after a while I didn't enjoy those portions as much. However, as someone who wishes his father was still alive so we could have conversations about life there never seemed to be time for then, I found Fun Home beautifully moving.
If you mostly read books via Kindle or another e-reader, do yourself a favor and borrow or buy the printed version of this one. I was so glad I made the investment to enjoy the power of how Bechdel's illustrations told as much of the story as her words. While this wasn't perhaps as good as I had expected it to be, it still is powerful, and I'll remember it for some time to come.
See all of my reviews at http://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blo....
Alison Bechdel's father Bruce was an enigma to her while she was growing up—an English teacher and director of the family-owned funeral home (aka the "Fun Home") who had an exacting eye for fashion, decor, and gardening. He wasn't a bad father, but he always seemed to keep her and her brothers at arm's length, not to mention her mother.
While Alison remembered some special, tender times, she remembered more moments of being forced to wear an outfit she didn't want, scolded into meeting his tough cleaning standards, and feeling bewildered at his obsession with making sure all of the flowers around their house always looked perfect.
When Alison was in college, she came out to her parents as a lesbian. Shortly thereafter, she found out that her father was gay. While perhaps not entirely surprising if she added up all of the signs and clues she might have noted subconsciously, the discovery still throws her for a loop. And while they had one half-conversation about this, a few weeks after his revelation, her father died, leaving a legacy of mystery and confusion in his wake.
"Perhaps my eagerness to claim him as 'gay' in the way I am 'gay,' as opposed to bisexual or some other category, is just a way of keeping him to myself—a sort of inverted oedipal complex."
Fun Home is both a daughter's efforts to make sense of her father's life and death as it is an account of growing up uncomfortable in your own skin, of knowing you are different but being afraid of acknowledging it for fear everything might change, even though it should. It's a story of coming to terms with who you are, while remembering a man who really never had that luxury.
I'm really late to the party in reading this, and while I've heard some of the music from the musical version of Fun Home , I never saw the show either. I've never read a graphic novel/memoir before (although I read lots of Archie, Betty, and Veronica comics growing up, and was addicted to the Silver Surfer), and this was both a refreshing and challenging format for me.
This book practically pulsates with emotion, anger, and confusion, as well as the uncertainty that comes with self-discovery. When it dealt with Alison's own life or her father's struggles to find himself, the book is strongest, but it spends a lot of time holding up their story against a backdrop of classic literature (which her father so loved), and after a while I didn't enjoy those portions as much. However, as someone who wishes his father was still alive so we could have conversations about life there never seemed to be time for then, I found Fun Home beautifully moving.
If you mostly read books via Kindle or another e-reader, do yourself a favor and borrow or buy the printed version of this one. I was so glad I made the investment to enjoy the power of how Bechdel's illustrations told as much of the story as her words. While this wasn't perhaps as good as I had expected it to be, it still is powerful, and I'll remember it for some time to come.
See all of my reviews at http://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blo....
February 9, 2024
A classic graphic memoir written by Alison Bechdel. The memoirs puts accent on the relationship with her late father and their strange house/also funeral home. When Alison comes out as lesbian, in college, she also finds out her father was gay. I appreciated the memoir but I did not feel much about it, I admit I was looking forward to reaching the end.
May 29, 2023
I just re-read Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic for my class on YA Graphic Novels with strong girl characters. A celebrated memoir, made into a Tony-award-winning musical. One of the best comics projects of all time. Meticulously wrought, with attention to every single detail in every single panel, this memoir reveals itself fairly early on as a dual "coming out" story of Bechdel and her father. To say when these events take place would be the spoiler, more than the fact of those admissions. To say that it is an accomplished work of art and memorable story is not to say that any of the members of Bechdel's family are warm and inviting; to the contrary, the often blisteringly candid tone with which she tells her story reveals that none of the Bechdels are easy to get along with (well, her brothers are very peripheral to this story, which leads me to suspect they were not all that interested in being talked about in their sister's story), including Bechdel.
Bechdel--known also for "the Bechdel test," an inquiry into how long a book/film can go without women talking about men--was first famous for her serialized and now lovingly collected Dykes to Watch Out For comic strips, which I read as a straight teenager in alternative rags as I grew up in conservative Grand Rapids, Michigan, my introduction to one warm and political and funny glbtq world. True fact: I was unaware of anyone in my school or community who was gay in the late sixties, a time known for the sexual--heterosexual?--revolution. It was not until I joined my college acting group, the Thespians, that I met out gay people, then exclusively men. Fun Home focuses on Bechdel's relationship with her father; she has since produced a very different book about her mother, Are You My Mother? which is also remarkable, insightful, accomplished, but this one is a book of discovery, of revelation, narrative uncovering.
Fun Home is also very literary, as Alison and her Dad share books with each other, so the literary references keep on coming, which as an English teacher type I loved. The title comes from the fact that Bechdel's high school English father also worked part time in the funeral parlor he inherited from his own father, a funeral parlor they also lived in, making ironic the idea of a "fun" home, though it is also clear any home with this family would have been something less than fun. But honesty begets admiration, not cuddles, as with Spiegelman's Maus and other comics. It's not about "making nice;" it's about making truth, and making it beautifully and clearly. Amazing classic.
Bechdel test:
http://bechdeltest.com
NPR interview with Bechel:
http://www.npr.org/2015/08/17/4325694...
Some images so you can see how meticulous Bechdel is with the art, but she is as meticulous with the telling:
https://www.pinterest.com/afoxfox10/f...
Bechdel--known also for "the Bechdel test," an inquiry into how long a book/film can go without women talking about men--was first famous for her serialized and now lovingly collected Dykes to Watch Out For comic strips, which I read as a straight teenager in alternative rags as I grew up in conservative Grand Rapids, Michigan, my introduction to one warm and political and funny glbtq world. True fact: I was unaware of anyone in my school or community who was gay in the late sixties, a time known for the sexual--heterosexual?--revolution. It was not until I joined my college acting group, the Thespians, that I met out gay people, then exclusively men. Fun Home focuses on Bechdel's relationship with her father; she has since produced a very different book about her mother, Are You My Mother? which is also remarkable, insightful, accomplished, but this one is a book of discovery, of revelation, narrative uncovering.
Fun Home is also very literary, as Alison and her Dad share books with each other, so the literary references keep on coming, which as an English teacher type I loved. The title comes from the fact that Bechdel's high school English father also worked part time in the funeral parlor he inherited from his own father, a funeral parlor they also lived in, making ironic the idea of a "fun" home, though it is also clear any home with this family would have been something less than fun. But honesty begets admiration, not cuddles, as with Spiegelman's Maus and other comics. It's not about "making nice;" it's about making truth, and making it beautifully and clearly. Amazing classic.
Bechdel test:
http://bechdeltest.com
NPR interview with Bechel:
http://www.npr.org/2015/08/17/4325694...
Some images so you can see how meticulous Bechdel is with the art, but she is as meticulous with the telling:
https://www.pinterest.com/afoxfox10/f...
June 23, 2017
Many Thanks to Margaret who recommended this book to me!
WOW! ....I knew NOTHING about this book -TERRIFIC/ SPECTACULAR-until it was in my hands today......(other than it was a highly recognized-graphic memoir - chosen best book of the year by at least 10 major publications in 2006).
80, 4333 people rated this book -- so where was I? Hidden away with blindfolds and earplugs?
There's a lot going on in this --'memoir'.... so much so, there could be several individual books written on any 'one' theme.
---For 18 years Allison grew up in a house of daily renovation. If anybody has lived through having their bathroom or kitchen remodeled--you know personally what the disruption feels like. Can you imagine your entire childhood around hammers and nails..... strips of loose molding? Remodeling is very stressful. I would think that many years of focus of renovation would drive every family member into a corner. That much daily physical chaos creates disconnected communications.
---I could understand that when Allison was little, her house, the walls, the wallpaper, the furniture, the curtains, all felt like another child in the house.
She, on the other hand, often felt like the furniture.
Allison offers elegant prose - pleasure - intelligence- and compassion-- through literary references....reflecting on classics read that both she and her dad enjoyed ( shared loved for books) .
They- she and her dad- never did come 'out' to each other. Both are gay. To get the 'full' story: READ THIS GRAPHIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY!!!
Suggestion: If you have not read this book, know 'nothing' about it......(having not read 'any' reviews- no blurbs- 'nothing'- have been living under a rock like I have ), if you are willing to 'trust'..... go in blind... DON'T read anything about this book until you have finished the last page ..... I HIGHLY RECOMMENDED reading it this way.
It's Sooooooo worth reading!!!!!!!
Another TOP- TOP - TOP graphic memoir!!!!!!
A few great quotes inspired by "Ulysses", by James Joyce.
WOW! ....I knew NOTHING about this book -TERRIFIC/ SPECTACULAR-until it was in my hands today......(other than it was a highly recognized-graphic memoir - chosen best book of the year by at least 10 major publications in 2006).
80, 4333 people rated this book -- so where was I? Hidden away with blindfolds and earplugs?
There's a lot going on in this --'memoir'.... so much so, there could be several individual books written on any 'one' theme.
---For 18 years Allison grew up in a house of daily renovation. If anybody has lived through having their bathroom or kitchen remodeled--you know personally what the disruption feels like. Can you imagine your entire childhood around hammers and nails..... strips of loose molding? Remodeling is very stressful. I would think that many years of focus of renovation would drive every family member into a corner. That much daily physical chaos creates disconnected communications.
---I could understand that when Allison was little, her house, the walls, the wallpaper, the furniture, the curtains, all felt like another child in the house.
She, on the other hand, often felt like the furniture.
Allison offers elegant prose - pleasure - intelligence- and compassion-- through literary references....reflecting on classics read that both she and her dad enjoyed ( shared loved for books) .
They- she and her dad- never did come 'out' to each other. Both are gay. To get the 'full' story: READ THIS GRAPHIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY!!!
Suggestion: If you have not read this book, know 'nothing' about it......(having not read 'any' reviews- no blurbs- 'nothing'- have been living under a rock like I have ), if you are willing to 'trust'..... go in blind... DON'T read anything about this book until you have finished the last page ..... I HIGHLY RECOMMENDED reading it this way.
It's Sooooooo worth reading!!!!!!!
Another TOP- TOP - TOP graphic memoir!!!!!!
A few great quotes inspired by "Ulysses", by James Joyce.
January 26, 2016
3.5/5
Fun Home's biggest flaw is its self-conscious, droll narrative voice that diminishes its raw earnestness at times. Alison Bechdel imposes her obsessive-compulsive desire for extracting meaning from even the most commonplace of occurrences on to a narrative of coming to terms with personal loss. And this whole exercize of drawing parallels between fictional and real life tragedies and pivotal emotional beats becomes too trite all too soon. Maybe she should have known when to put the kibosh on this thing.
But it's okay. Since I understand wherefrom this monomaniacal urge originates. It's hard to make sense of a father's death especially at an age when you were only just learning how to peel off layers of pretensions obfuscating the unadulterated reality that lay at the core of his personhood. It's not so much a crushing sadness that hits you but an overwhelming disbelief and a sense of 'it's not fair' which becomes so large and potent a force that it pushes out all concomitant emotions of bereavement from your mind leaving a kind of vacuum.
Before my to psychobabble gets the better of my good sense, let me come clean about my personal reasons for rating this work as high as 3.5 stars. Greater than the sum of my annoyance at Bechdel's rather shabby artwork (at times I couldn't tell the difference between Bruce Bechdel and Alison's brothers) and her tendency to forge correlations between Proust, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Colette, Henry James, Wilde's fictional characters and snippets of memorable moments from her dysfunctional childhood spent in a rural Pennsylvania homestead, was my genuine appreciation for this heartfelt tribute to such a delightfully ambiguous father. Having lost a father at 14, I know how it feels trying to grasp at straws, trying to analyze one seemingly inconsequential incident or subjecting one precious shared moment to intense and concentrated scrutiny from all possible angles. Stray notes tucked in between the last page and the backcover of a magazine recovered years later, journals, hand-written letters, favorite paperbacks, the only bit of literary criticism he published, heaps of carefully organized notes that he prepared for his classes, tapes containing his voice recordings cooing at your tiny baby form and anecdotes recounted by the ones who knew him better and longer than you did become coded roadsigns to some secret location promising complete de-mystification. But you know it's just delusional thinking anyway. You will never know him the way you could have.
Unlike Bruce Bechdel who grappled with the stark contradiction between his public reality and private urges all his life, my father didn't particularly have any skeletons in his closet. And even if he did I have no way of unraveling that mystery now. But what I do have in common with Bechdel's perspective on her father, is this perplexity, subliminal resentment and an amused incredulity about his life and his deeds. How can he be just a person existing in the past tense now? At least she must have achieved some kind of closure through the creation of this part graphic memoir part literary essay on remembering a loved one. I certainly hope she did.
My rating and review are thus reprehensibly subjective. Do not expect more from a reviewer who has massive daddy issues and will continue to deal with them till the day she breathes her last. I solemnly confess to being more moved by the parts focusing on her family rather than the Künstlerroman-ish bits about her 'coming out' in college and identifying as a butch woman. But what stopped me from rating this any higher is the painfully overwrought sentence construction Bechdel employs which aside from being cringe-worthy at times creates an unwanted dissonance between the import of an emotional moment and its actual graphical representation and execution.
I'm sorry Ms Bechdel but if this is your attempt at cracking a joke on the likelihood of your gay self having a conversation with your gay dad about well being gay, it's kind of pathetic.
Fun Home's biggest flaw is its self-conscious, droll narrative voice that diminishes its raw earnestness at times. Alison Bechdel imposes her obsessive-compulsive desire for extracting meaning from even the most commonplace of occurrences on to a narrative of coming to terms with personal loss. And this whole exercize of drawing parallels between fictional and real life tragedies and pivotal emotional beats becomes too trite all too soon. Maybe she should have known when to put the kibosh on this thing.
But it's okay. Since I understand wherefrom this monomaniacal urge originates. It's hard to make sense of a father's death especially at an age when you were only just learning how to peel off layers of pretensions obfuscating the unadulterated reality that lay at the core of his personhood. It's not so much a crushing sadness that hits you but an overwhelming disbelief and a sense of 'it's not fair' which becomes so large and potent a force that it pushes out all concomitant emotions of bereavement from your mind leaving a kind of vacuum.
Before my to psychobabble gets the better of my good sense, let me come clean about my personal reasons for rating this work as high as 3.5 stars. Greater than the sum of my annoyance at Bechdel's rather shabby artwork (at times I couldn't tell the difference between Bruce Bechdel and Alison's brothers) and her tendency to forge correlations between Proust, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Colette, Henry James, Wilde's fictional characters and snippets of memorable moments from her dysfunctional childhood spent in a rural Pennsylvania homestead, was my genuine appreciation for this heartfelt tribute to such a delightfully ambiguous father. Having lost a father at 14, I know how it feels trying to grasp at straws, trying to analyze one seemingly inconsequential incident or subjecting one precious shared moment to intense and concentrated scrutiny from all possible angles. Stray notes tucked in between the last page and the backcover of a magazine recovered years later, journals, hand-written letters, favorite paperbacks, the only bit of literary criticism he published, heaps of carefully organized notes that he prepared for his classes, tapes containing his voice recordings cooing at your tiny baby form and anecdotes recounted by the ones who knew him better and longer than you did become coded roadsigns to some secret location promising complete de-mystification. But you know it's just delusional thinking anyway. You will never know him the way you could have.
Unlike Bruce Bechdel who grappled with the stark contradiction between his public reality and private urges all his life, my father didn't particularly have any skeletons in his closet. And even if he did I have no way of unraveling that mystery now. But what I do have in common with Bechdel's perspective on her father, is this perplexity, subliminal resentment and an amused incredulity about his life and his deeds. How can he be just a person existing in the past tense now? At least she must have achieved some kind of closure through the creation of this part graphic memoir part literary essay on remembering a loved one. I certainly hope she did.
My rating and review are thus reprehensibly subjective. Do not expect more from a reviewer who has massive daddy issues and will continue to deal with them till the day she breathes her last. I solemnly confess to being more moved by the parts focusing on her family rather than the Künstlerroman-ish bits about her 'coming out' in college and identifying as a butch woman. But what stopped me from rating this any higher is the painfully overwrought sentence construction Bechdel employs which aside from being cringe-worthy at times creates an unwanted dissonance between the import of an emotional moment and its actual graphical representation and execution.
I would see my father one more time after this. But we would never discuss our shared predilection again.
I'm sorry Ms Bechdel but if this is your attempt at cracking a joke on the likelihood of your gay self having a conversation with your gay dad about well being gay, it's kind of pathetic.
September 15, 2015
Here's why I give this book only a single star and didn't finish it.
Alison Bechdel is smart. And here's how my relationship goes with people who are chronically, unendingly smart usually goes.
1. I think to myself, "I want to talk to some smart people who have big ideas."
2. I avail myself of a smart person.
3. Smart person tells me an oral sex story, comparing the events to Homeric writings, perhaps even using the word "Homeric".
4. Smart person asks a lot of questions like, "Have you read Proust?" Not because anything about me makes them think I would enjoy Proust.
5. I go home and eat Bugles straight off the coffee table while I play video games and realize that this makes me much happier. Even though I'm eating with my face the way a dog does.
I know that Fun Home isn't designed to make me happy. That's not its purpose. I'm cool with experiences that aren't as fun as being drunk on a rollercoaster. I'm great with books and movies and songs that make me, specifically, unhappy.
Fun Home, though well-executed in a lot of ways, was just not compelling to me. It seemed to almost push away emotion with vocabulary and reference, and it felt very cold to me. The method of referencing classic literature to explain Bechdel's life events made them less impactful, to me. The specificity of her experiences and her father's character especially were interesting, and to me, the narrative and the narrative voice were weakened by the way the references made them more universal.
Please note the repeated phrase "to me."
I mean, when Bechdel is with a partner, she says:
"Joan was not just a visionary and activist, but a bona fide cyclops...she'd lost one eye in a childhood accident vividly reminiscent of the way Odysseus blinded Polyphemus."
For those unfamiliar, Polyphemus was this big-ass cyclops dude in The Odyssey. Odysseus and his men land on an island, check out this cave full of stuff, and then Polyphemus rolls a big stone in front of the opening so the men are trapped inside. Every couple days he eats a couple of the guys until Odysseus gets him drunk and stabs him right in his only damn eye. Then, he and the uneaten men make an escape.
That's how Polyphemus lost an eye.
Here's Joan's description of how she lost her eye, which is in a word balloon right beneath this Polyphemus stuff:
"A boy shot me with one of those toy arrows after the suction cup fell off."
...
Really?!
Joan, it turns out, was not a cycloptic giant who ate men she trapped in a cave. She had a childhood incident that killed one of her eyes. If anything, this story is more reminiscent of the holiday classic A Christmas Story than it is of Homer's Odyssey. I mean, the only parallel I see here is that both Polyphemus and this woman lost an eye. That's it. That's like, "My name is Pete. And wait a second. Peter in the Bible...he was crucified upside-down...and I get dizzy when rollercoasters go upside-down...what a fascinating parallel!"
I'm not going to say that I think Bechdel is being disingenuous. She clearly thinks quite deeply about culture and literature and whatnot, and this might actually be how her brain works. And that's cool. But as a reader, it feels like a long way to go to tie two things together that don't need to be tied together in the first place. And while the book is very reflective, it doesn't feel self-aware in a way of "I know it sounds ridiculous, but here's what I thought of..." Or, "Cut me some slack. I was in college."
I guess there's a way in which this just sounds like anti-intellectual talk. And I assure you, it's not. It's not because I don't understand words like "humectant" or am unwilling to investigate. It's not because I refuse to believe that Bechdel really thinks and talks that way.
It's because I don't want to read that way. 1-star review is because, for me, it's 1 star. I'm not a pro reviewer or anything, and I don't feel responsible to rate something as I imagine it would be rated by the general public. Nor is that a worthwhile exercise because you can see the average rating, so go with that.
There you go. A smart person, no complaints about the politics of the story whatsoever. And frankly, its status as a classic doesn't bother me even though I don't like it. This can be a classic as can something I like. There can be more than one canon graphic novel, and there will be. It's just a book that doesn't interest me or tell a story in a way that I can appreciate.
Alison Bechdel is smart. And here's how my relationship goes with people who are chronically, unendingly smart usually goes.
1. I think to myself, "I want to talk to some smart people who have big ideas."
2. I avail myself of a smart person.
3. Smart person tells me an oral sex story, comparing the events to Homeric writings, perhaps even using the word "Homeric".
4. Smart person asks a lot of questions like, "Have you read Proust?" Not because anything about me makes them think I would enjoy Proust.
5. I go home and eat Bugles straight off the coffee table while I play video games and realize that this makes me much happier. Even though I'm eating with my face the way a dog does.
I know that Fun Home isn't designed to make me happy. That's not its purpose. I'm cool with experiences that aren't as fun as being drunk on a rollercoaster. I'm great with books and movies and songs that make me, specifically, unhappy.
Fun Home, though well-executed in a lot of ways, was just not compelling to me. It seemed to almost push away emotion with vocabulary and reference, and it felt very cold to me. The method of referencing classic literature to explain Bechdel's life events made them less impactful, to me. The specificity of her experiences and her father's character especially were interesting, and to me, the narrative and the narrative voice were weakened by the way the references made them more universal.
Please note the repeated phrase "to me."
I mean, when Bechdel is with a partner, she says:
"Joan was not just a visionary and activist, but a bona fide cyclops...she'd lost one eye in a childhood accident vividly reminiscent of the way Odysseus blinded Polyphemus."
For those unfamiliar, Polyphemus was this big-ass cyclops dude in The Odyssey. Odysseus and his men land on an island, check out this cave full of stuff, and then Polyphemus rolls a big stone in front of the opening so the men are trapped inside. Every couple days he eats a couple of the guys until Odysseus gets him drunk and stabs him right in his only damn eye. Then, he and the uneaten men make an escape.
That's how Polyphemus lost an eye.
Here's Joan's description of how she lost her eye, which is in a word balloon right beneath this Polyphemus stuff:
"A boy shot me with one of those toy arrows after the suction cup fell off."
...
Really?!
Joan, it turns out, was not a cycloptic giant who ate men she trapped in a cave. She had a childhood incident that killed one of her eyes. If anything, this story is more reminiscent of the holiday classic A Christmas Story than it is of Homer's Odyssey. I mean, the only parallel I see here is that both Polyphemus and this woman lost an eye. That's it. That's like, "My name is Pete. And wait a second. Peter in the Bible...he was crucified upside-down...and I get dizzy when rollercoasters go upside-down...what a fascinating parallel!"
I'm not going to say that I think Bechdel is being disingenuous. She clearly thinks quite deeply about culture and literature and whatnot, and this might actually be how her brain works. And that's cool. But as a reader, it feels like a long way to go to tie two things together that don't need to be tied together in the first place. And while the book is very reflective, it doesn't feel self-aware in a way of "I know it sounds ridiculous, but here's what I thought of..." Or, "Cut me some slack. I was in college."
I guess there's a way in which this just sounds like anti-intellectual talk. And I assure you, it's not. It's not because I don't understand words like "humectant" or am unwilling to investigate. It's not because I refuse to believe that Bechdel really thinks and talks that way.
It's because I don't want to read that way. 1-star review is because, for me, it's 1 star. I'm not a pro reviewer or anything, and I don't feel responsible to rate something as I imagine it would be rated by the general public. Nor is that a worthwhile exercise because you can see the average rating, so go with that.
There you go. A smart person, no complaints about the politics of the story whatsoever. And frankly, its status as a classic doesn't bother me even though I don't like it. This can be a classic as can something I like. There can be more than one canon graphic novel, and there will be. It's just a book that doesn't interest me or tell a story in a way that I can appreciate.
August 2, 2018
This graphic memoir has been on my to read list for what feels like ages, so I felt entirely satisfied when I completed reading it.
In this graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father.
Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the Fun Home. It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.
In the end, I was compelled to pick up Fun Home completely on a whim. Though I flew through it, a lot of the literary references went shamefully over my head. And considering that it was such a big focus here, I was left out of the loop a lot, which ended up lowering my enjoyment while reading.
Also, I was made entirely uncomfortable with her father and his violent tendencies towards his family, his preying on young boys, and his overall behavior towards the naïve.
I did like how something that Alison Bechdel mentioned in the first half would then get completed in the second half. And I learned quite a lot about funerals, which I was not expecting going into this. Also, Bechdel taking the time to discuss her OCD was crucial and enlightening.
On that note, here are some other parts I enjoyed:
When their grandma told the tale of how Bruce Bechdel got stuck in the mud, I was just as compelled as the kids. I wanted to know more.
I LOVE hearing about dreams.
Ever since I read the above exchange, it's been on my mind constantly.
I'm curious to see what her next graphic novel Are You My Mother? entails.
*Note: I'm an Amazon Affiliate. If you're interested in buying Fun Home, just click on the image below to go through my link. I'll make a small commission!*
Support creators you love. Buy a Coffee for nat (bookspoils) with Ko-fi.com/bookspoils
In this graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father.
Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the Fun Home. It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.
In the end, I was compelled to pick up Fun Home completely on a whim. Though I flew through it, a lot of the literary references went shamefully over my head. And considering that it was such a big focus here, I was left out of the loop a lot, which ended up lowering my enjoyment while reading.
Also, I was made entirely uncomfortable with her father and his violent tendencies towards his family, his preying on young boys, and his overall behavior towards the naïve.
I did like how something that Alison Bechdel mentioned in the first half would then get completed in the second half. And I learned quite a lot about funerals, which I was not expecting going into this. Also, Bechdel taking the time to discuss her OCD was crucial and enlightening.
On that note, here are some other parts I enjoyed:
When their grandma told the tale of how Bruce Bechdel got stuck in the mud, I was just as compelled as the kids. I wanted to know more.
I LOVE hearing about dreams.
Ever since I read the above exchange, it's been on my mind constantly.
I'm curious to see what her next graphic novel Are You My Mother? entails.
*Note: I'm an Amazon Affiliate. If you're interested in buying Fun Home, just click on the image below to go through my link. I'll make a small commission!*
Support creators you love. Buy a Coffee for nat (bookspoils) with Ko-fi.com/bookspoils
January 29, 2019
ETA: This is from the comment section, where somebody rightfully called me out on not bringing proof of Fun Home's badness, and said I just don't understand Bechdel's "stylistic choices". This is me bringing the receipts, including diagrams which I very poorly made in paint. If you just want the review, skip this part.
_______________________
Honestly, I have no idea why this is considered such a classic of graphic memoirs. I'm not an expert on this form, and feel self-conscious critiquing graphic literature because of this, but let's work through this.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic details growing in a cold home where all the occupants isolated themselves in artistic pursuit. Alison Bechdel (of the Bechdel test) particularly focuses on her relationship with her closeted father, who killed himself soon after she came out as a lesbian in college.
Even without considering the graphic element, the writing is labored verging on tortured. The narration consists of endless confused comparisons of her family's situation to classic literature. I don't object to allusions when they are deployed to refine the writer's own vision of the narrative. But Bechdel's dependence on literary allusions don't feel like attempts to illuminate -- they obscure; they waffle about for a few pages a time before being replaced about by other thin allusions.
In fact, as the narrative proceeds in fits and stops and weaves and jumps rather haphazardly, it most frequently seems even Bechdel herself hasn't a clue where she's going with this.
Furthermore, the art of Fun Home is drab and uninteresting. Certainly I never mistake people's hands for kitchen implements, but nor does it move beyond serviceable.Her character designs fail at being distinctive; identifying even Alison herself at various different ages in the story is a struggle.
Bechdel's use of paneling and pacing is monotonous and unimaginative. The same thirds layout appears again and again (three horizontal panels, divided by text, the middle panel further divided vertically into two pictures). She eschews texture, and almost exclusively uses a light-grey tone out of the range of black and white. Her compositions similarly fail to employ white or negative space, and the final product feels impossibly bland.
Singularly, the writing and the art are mostly dull, but combined, they make a potent combination of bad. There's almost no interplay between the two; dialogue is limited at best, superfluous at worst. Instead, they work at cross purposes: text boxes of elaborately overworked SAT-bonus narration crowd out crude bland drawings. It's a clashing glaring mismatch that only increases the confusion of reading Fun Home, the biggest confusion being why it's in the format of a graphic novel at all. Rating: 1 star
_______________________
Honestly, I have no idea why this is considered such a classic of graphic memoirs. I'm not an expert on this form, and feel self-conscious critiquing graphic literature because of this, but let's work through this.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic details growing in a cold home where all the occupants isolated themselves in artistic pursuit. Alison Bechdel (of the Bechdel test) particularly focuses on her relationship with her closeted father, who killed himself soon after she came out as a lesbian in college.
Even without considering the graphic element, the writing is labored verging on tortured. The narration consists of endless confused comparisons of her family's situation to classic literature. I don't object to allusions when they are deployed to refine the writer's own vision of the narrative. But Bechdel's dependence on literary allusions don't feel like attempts to illuminate -- they obscure; they waffle about for a few pages a time before being replaced about by other thin allusions.
In fact, as the narrative proceeds in fits and stops and weaves and jumps rather haphazardly, it most frequently seems even Bechdel herself hasn't a clue where she's going with this.
Furthermore, the art of Fun Home is drab and uninteresting. Certainly I never mistake people's hands for kitchen implements, but nor does it move beyond serviceable.Her character designs fail at being distinctive; identifying even Alison herself at various different ages in the story is a struggle.
Bechdel's use of paneling and pacing is monotonous and unimaginative. The same thirds layout appears again and again (three horizontal panels, divided by text, the middle panel further divided vertically into two pictures). She eschews texture, and almost exclusively uses a light-grey tone out of the range of black and white. Her compositions similarly fail to employ white or negative space, and the final product feels impossibly bland.
Singularly, the writing and the art are mostly dull, but combined, they make a potent combination of bad. There's almost no interplay between the two; dialogue is limited at best, superfluous at worst. Instead, they work at cross purposes: text boxes of elaborately overworked SAT-bonus narration crowd out crude bland drawings. It's a clashing glaring mismatch that only increases the confusion of reading Fun Home, the biggest confusion being why it's in the format of a graphic novel at all. Rating: 1 star
December 9, 2015
Hmmm...
Well, I wanted to read this for some time, mostly because Alison Bechdel is probably one of the more prominent names that both authors and readers are aware of these days due to her test. Anyway, I wanted to like this more than I did. You see, I'm not really a fan of graphic novels, but it worked here to illustrate her points. However, this whole book felt more like a project of self-analysis than a commercial product. It was extremely personal, yet cold and detached--like Alison's parents, which I think is the entire point.
3 stars overall because there was something there, but that just wasn't entertainment.
Well, I wanted to read this for some time, mostly because Alison Bechdel is probably one of the more prominent names that both authors and readers are aware of these days due to her test. Anyway, I wanted to like this more than I did. You see, I'm not really a fan of graphic novels, but it worked here to illustrate her points. However, this whole book felt more like a project of self-analysis than a commercial product. It was extremely personal, yet cold and detached--like Alison's parents, which I think is the entire point.
3 stars overall because there was something there, but that just wasn't entertainment.
February 9, 2020
this just...wasn't for me.
not going to write more of a review than: this was 85% literary references, 14% fantastic art, 1% abject suffering.
0% the fun referenced in the title.
bottom line: not for me!!! just a preference thing!
-----------
spent the first few pages of this completely convinced i'd read it before, only to realize i'd started it, not liked it, and put it down.
promising beginning.
not going to write more of a review than: this was 85% literary references, 14% fantastic art, 1% abject suffering.
0% the fun referenced in the title.
bottom line: not for me!!! just a preference thing!
-----------
spent the first few pages of this completely convinced i'd read it before, only to realize i'd started it, not liked it, and put it down.
promising beginning.
October 14, 2018
My life is such a hot ass mess right now that it took me a week to read this even though I loved it. Whereas most graphic novels are quick, fun reads, this is unlike anything I've read before because it’s so rich with meaning. This is like a literary fiction novel tucked into a graphic novel. It made me think, it wowed me with its language, and it definitely provoked a lot of thought about family and sexuality and... I don't know. Emotions?
I guess autobiographical graphic novels are my favorite because this and Blankets by Craig Thompson are some of the best I've read in that genre.
I guess autobiographical graphic novels are my favorite because this and Blankets by Craig Thompson are some of the best I've read in that genre.
December 4, 2013
Book #4 for Jugs & Capes, my all-girl graphic-novel book club!
You can also read this review (slightly tweaked) on CCLaP.
***
I've been wanting to read this book for years. Isn't it crazy that I had to start an entire graphic novel book club to somehow give myself permission to read it?
Perhaps. But who cares about the machinations I forced myself through to get to it? I am so glad I did. This book is simply spectacular. It is dense, fraught with meaning, stuffed with prose and complimented by simple illustrations. And in addition to being incredibly smart, incredibly illuminating, and incredibly inventive, it's also incredibly sexy. There's a scene where Alison and her girlfriend are in bed together making out, while reading the dictionary. Sexy nerdery! Incredible!
In case anyone doesn't know, Fun Home is a memoir about Alison Bechdel's childhood and early adulthood. She has two younger brothers, an actress mother, and a father who teaches high-school English and runs a funeral home. Yeah. Oh, and dad's a deeply closeted gay.
I'd like, as I always do with well-done memoirs, to invoke one of the blurbs on my favorite-ever memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City : Finally, someone with a life worth writing about has got the skill to write about it. Oh, Alison, what skill! What a life! What a uniquely wonderful way of telling it!
The book has seven chapters, each of which is structured around a book. And I'm not talking about lowbrow or predictably canonized books, either; we've got Icarus and Dedalus, Camus's A Happy Death, The Great Gatsby, Proust, The Wind in the Willows, Henry James, and Ulysses. Holy moly, Alison is one smart cookie. She shrewdly and exhaustively catalogues and examines the parallels between these disparate works and the structure and choices and emotional makeup of her family, enhancing an already fascinating story with layers of intertextual readings and adept analysis. She says: "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." That makes me shiver.
Her language made me shiver a lot, actually, which is not something I expect from a graphic novel. (But let me reiterate that I've read probably less than a dozen graphic novels in my adult life, so excuse me if that's a stupid assumption.) Her prose is complex, lyrical, intelligent, and apt. She describes a summer afternoon in Greenwich Village by saying, "the city was reduced, like a long-simmering demiglace, to a fragrance of stunning richness and complexity." In a section which covers her own puberty as it coincides with a cicada summer, she says, "Next the locusts settled down to an orgy in our tall maple trees, cloaking us from dawn to dusk in the ambient noise of their conjugal exertions." In the chapter about her own journey of coming out as a lesbian (which is also the Ulysses chapter), she says, "I was adrift on the high seas, but my course was becoming clear. It lay between the scylla of my peers and the swirling, sucking charybdis of my family." Beautiful.
And I haven't even gotten to the art yet. I'm still working out how I relate to graphic novels, and it turns out I'm both too harsh a judge and also too easy. It takes little to impress me artistically—much less than it takes to impress me literarily, for sure—and so I find almost any art to be good. On the other hand, though, when I read graphic novels, I can't stop wondering why the author chose this format to tell his or her story, which is certainly not something I ever stop to consider with straight prose. Due to this, I actually find myself a little bit distracted, over-examining many of the frames in order to try to parse just why this story needed illustrating. I did that a lot in this book too, and while I didn't come to a clear answer, I did find many frames that were not just augmented, but wholly changed, for the better of course, by the compliment of the illustration.
For example, there's a half-page frame at the end of a chapter that shows Alison visiting her father's grave. With a short phrase of text that only harkens back to an anecdote related earlier in the chapter, the reader is free to attach all the end-of-chapter meaning to this large image, which is the graveyard, at twilight (probably; the shadows are long), empty but for Alison lying on her back in front of her father's monument, her bike on its side next to her. This is such a beautiful, aching image! And she didn't have to bother spelling out her loneliness, her puzzlement, the hours she spent in silent communion with her dead father. It's all there, exquisitely bare. Or in another image, full page, she compares a picture of her father at twenty-two to a picture of herself at twenty-one. In this one she does use words to enumerate certain similarities—pained grin, flexible wrists, angle of shadow on faces—but still the illustrations augment these bare-bones descriptions brilliantly. One last example: as she discusses the artifice in her childhood diary (she has written, "We might have to move! How horrid!"), the text reads, "How horrid has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me a Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror—puberty, public disgrace—then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing." The illustration here? Alison and her father watching, on TV, the Roadrunner eat the "free birdseed" and then speed away just before the anvil comes crashing down on his head. So there's the wry literary analysis of herself as an over-dramatic teen, the sharply augmenting pop-culture parallel, and then also the overlay of she and her father laughing together, in a rare moment of closeness. What a terrific, multi-layered whole!
There's so much left that I didn't talk about yet, but I suppose it won't do any good to say much more. This book is an absolutely astonishing delight, and if I haven't convinced you of that yet, I'm not going to bother trying anymore.
You can also read this review (slightly tweaked) on CCLaP.
***
I've been wanting to read this book for years. Isn't it crazy that I had to start an entire graphic novel book club to somehow give myself permission to read it?
Perhaps. But who cares about the machinations I forced myself through to get to it? I am so glad I did. This book is simply spectacular. It is dense, fraught with meaning, stuffed with prose and complimented by simple illustrations. And in addition to being incredibly smart, incredibly illuminating, and incredibly inventive, it's also incredibly sexy. There's a scene where Alison and her girlfriend are in bed together making out, while reading the dictionary. Sexy nerdery! Incredible!
In case anyone doesn't know, Fun Home is a memoir about Alison Bechdel's childhood and early adulthood. She has two younger brothers, an actress mother, and a father who teaches high-school English and runs a funeral home. Yeah. Oh, and dad's a deeply closeted gay.
I'd like, as I always do with well-done memoirs, to invoke one of the blurbs on my favorite-ever memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City : Finally, someone with a life worth writing about has got the skill to write about it. Oh, Alison, what skill! What a life! What a uniquely wonderful way of telling it!
The book has seven chapters, each of which is structured around a book. And I'm not talking about lowbrow or predictably canonized books, either; we've got Icarus and Dedalus, Camus's A Happy Death, The Great Gatsby, Proust, The Wind in the Willows, Henry James, and Ulysses. Holy moly, Alison is one smart cookie. She shrewdly and exhaustively catalogues and examines the parallels between these disparate works and the structure and choices and emotional makeup of her family, enhancing an already fascinating story with layers of intertextual readings and adept analysis. She says: "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." That makes me shiver.
Her language made me shiver a lot, actually, which is not something I expect from a graphic novel. (But let me reiterate that I've read probably less than a dozen graphic novels in my adult life, so excuse me if that's a stupid assumption.) Her prose is complex, lyrical, intelligent, and apt. She describes a summer afternoon in Greenwich Village by saying, "the city was reduced, like a long-simmering demiglace, to a fragrance of stunning richness and complexity." In a section which covers her own puberty as it coincides with a cicada summer, she says, "Next the locusts settled down to an orgy in our tall maple trees, cloaking us from dawn to dusk in the ambient noise of their conjugal exertions." In the chapter about her own journey of coming out as a lesbian (which is also the Ulysses chapter), she says, "I was adrift on the high seas, but my course was becoming clear. It lay between the scylla of my peers and the swirling, sucking charybdis of my family." Beautiful.
And I haven't even gotten to the art yet. I'm still working out how I relate to graphic novels, and it turns out I'm both too harsh a judge and also too easy. It takes little to impress me artistically—much less than it takes to impress me literarily, for sure—and so I find almost any art to be good. On the other hand, though, when I read graphic novels, I can't stop wondering why the author chose this format to tell his or her story, which is certainly not something I ever stop to consider with straight prose. Due to this, I actually find myself a little bit distracted, over-examining many of the frames in order to try to parse just why this story needed illustrating. I did that a lot in this book too, and while I didn't come to a clear answer, I did find many frames that were not just augmented, but wholly changed, for the better of course, by the compliment of the illustration.
For example, there's a half-page frame at the end of a chapter that shows Alison visiting her father's grave. With a short phrase of text that only harkens back to an anecdote related earlier in the chapter, the reader is free to attach all the end-of-chapter meaning to this large image, which is the graveyard, at twilight (probably; the shadows are long), empty but for Alison lying on her back in front of her father's monument, her bike on its side next to her. This is such a beautiful, aching image! And she didn't have to bother spelling out her loneliness, her puzzlement, the hours she spent in silent communion with her dead father. It's all there, exquisitely bare. Or in another image, full page, she compares a picture of her father at twenty-two to a picture of herself at twenty-one. In this one she does use words to enumerate certain similarities—pained grin, flexible wrists, angle of shadow on faces—but still the illustrations augment these bare-bones descriptions brilliantly. One last example: as she discusses the artifice in her childhood diary (she has written, "We might have to move! How horrid!"), the text reads, "How horrid has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me a Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror—puberty, public disgrace—then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing." The illustration here? Alison and her father watching, on TV, the Roadrunner eat the "free birdseed" and then speed away just before the anvil comes crashing down on his head. So there's the wry literary analysis of herself as an over-dramatic teen, the sharply augmenting pop-culture parallel, and then also the overlay of she and her father laughing together, in a rare moment of closeness. What a terrific, multi-layered whole!
There's so much left that I didn't talk about yet, but I suppose it won't do any good to say much more. This book is an absolutely astonishing delight, and if I haven't convinced you of that yet, I'm not going to bother trying anymore.
April 27, 2008
I went out and bought this book immediately after hearing a paper on it at a recent conference. The paper had to do with narrative strategies that children use for uncovering and witnessing their parents' trauma -- in this book, the narrator Allison tries to piece together her father's life into a narrative she wants to read as that of a closeted gay man. In the narrator's logic, her coming out of the closet prompted her father's suicide four months later. After a life of secret affairs and seduction of teenage boys, her father -- according to her narrative -- couldn't face having missed out on -- or chasing after -- the freedom that was now available to her as a post-Stonewall gay woman.
But it's not clear how much credit we are to give to this narration, and how much the point of the narrative is to expose its own tenuousness. Her father's death was ruled an accident -- he stumbled into oncoming traffic while clearing a lot. Even if the death was willed, the narrator herself provides plenty of evidence for other constructions of what could have caused the suicide. A man whose rage for order verged on Mommy Dearest, the father clearly suffered from a mood disorder, narcissism, and even a tendency to kleptomania -- none of which are endemic to homosexuality, even of the closeted sort. The man was unpleasant, clearly disturbed and distraught by his wife's recent request for a divorce.
Thus the the narrator's attempt to integrate his death into the story of her coming out is as much a story about how badly she wants to be connected to him, as it is about any objective explanation of his life and death. Every episode she recounts is layered to the point of being overburdened with symbolism -- the summer her father gets into trouble with the law for seducing a teenage boy is also the summer her mother has the lead in an Oscar Wilde play -- and also the summer Allison gets her period. And also the summer that the Watergate scandal is exposed. This surplus of symbolic baggage is further compromised by the narrator's accounts her own childhood attempts to keep a diary -- which she marked up with the annotations "I think" "I think" "I think" to ward off the dangers of claiming as objective what was only her point of view. As much as she tells us about her father, the narrator tells us even more about why we should be sceptical of what she's telling us.
And maybe what's most fascinating about her attempts to identify her homosexuality to her father's sexual life is all of the possible identifications she has to shut down to get there. Identifying with her father means she doesn't have to identify with the teenage boys he exploited, placing his desires before their autonomy. Naming her coming out of the closet as the catalyst for her father's death removes blame from her mother, whose request for divorce might otherwise provide a suicide motive. At the same time it erases the possibility that coming out of the closet prompted her mother to ask for the divorce, moved to escape a sham marriage by her own daughter's unwillingness to play along with convention. The narrator's musings that if her father had chosen in the early 80s not suicide but life as a gay man, he probably would have ended up dead of AIDS anyway acts a safety valve, a way of keeping her identification with her father from becoming too all-consuming. The father who controlled the decor of her bedroom, the clothes she wore, the books she read could just as easily have moved in and decided to inhabit and use even her homosexuality as an extension of himself if he hadn't died first. Her dependence in the last few chapters of the novel on Proust, Joyce and Collette to explain her relationship with her father seem a distancing move, so that she might understand her identification with her father as an identification with any character in a book -- intense, but not impinging in one's daily life.
The potential destruction the father could have worked on the daughter by living might be read in the baroque level of detail this graphic novel has, despite being authored and illustrated by a self-professed modern minimalist. Instead of spare lines and empty spaces Allison Bechdel fills her book with the gingerbread latticing, velvet flocked wall-paper and intricately carved bannisters of her father's pretentious Victorian tastes.
But it's not clear how much credit we are to give to this narration, and how much the point of the narrative is to expose its own tenuousness. Her father's death was ruled an accident -- he stumbled into oncoming traffic while clearing a lot. Even if the death was willed, the narrator herself provides plenty of evidence for other constructions of what could have caused the suicide. A man whose rage for order verged on Mommy Dearest, the father clearly suffered from a mood disorder, narcissism, and even a tendency to kleptomania -- none of which are endemic to homosexuality, even of the closeted sort. The man was unpleasant, clearly disturbed and distraught by his wife's recent request for a divorce.
Thus the the narrator's attempt to integrate his death into the story of her coming out is as much a story about how badly she wants to be connected to him, as it is about any objective explanation of his life and death. Every episode she recounts is layered to the point of being overburdened with symbolism -- the summer her father gets into trouble with the law for seducing a teenage boy is also the summer her mother has the lead in an Oscar Wilde play -- and also the summer Allison gets her period. And also the summer that the Watergate scandal is exposed. This surplus of symbolic baggage is further compromised by the narrator's accounts her own childhood attempts to keep a diary -- which she marked up with the annotations "I think" "I think" "I think" to ward off the dangers of claiming as objective what was only her point of view. As much as she tells us about her father, the narrator tells us even more about why we should be sceptical of what she's telling us.
And maybe what's most fascinating about her attempts to identify her homosexuality to her father's sexual life is all of the possible identifications she has to shut down to get there. Identifying with her father means she doesn't have to identify with the teenage boys he exploited, placing his desires before their autonomy. Naming her coming out of the closet as the catalyst for her father's death removes blame from her mother, whose request for divorce might otherwise provide a suicide motive. At the same time it erases the possibility that coming out of the closet prompted her mother to ask for the divorce, moved to escape a sham marriage by her own daughter's unwillingness to play along with convention. The narrator's musings that if her father had chosen in the early 80s not suicide but life as a gay man, he probably would have ended up dead of AIDS anyway acts a safety valve, a way of keeping her identification with her father from becoming too all-consuming. The father who controlled the decor of her bedroom, the clothes she wore, the books she read could just as easily have moved in and decided to inhabit and use even her homosexuality as an extension of himself if he hadn't died first. Her dependence in the last few chapters of the novel on Proust, Joyce and Collette to explain her relationship with her father seem a distancing move, so that she might understand her identification with her father as an identification with any character in a book -- intense, but not impinging in one's daily life.
The potential destruction the father could have worked on the daughter by living might be read in the baroque level of detail this graphic novel has, despite being authored and illustrated by a self-professed modern minimalist. Instead of spare lines and empty spaces Allison Bechdel fills her book with the gingerbread latticing, velvet flocked wall-paper and intricately carved bannisters of her father's pretentious Victorian tastes.
October 13, 2017
Updated
This is a terrific book.
The graphic memoir format added an extraordinary dimension to the story. (I can't recall ever having read a graphic novel before, so in that sense the entire experience of this book was new to me.)
The book was published when Bechdel was in her mid-40s, and tells the story of her own life, up to just before her twentieth birthday, and her father’s life, up to the same point in time, when he was run over by a truck - possibly accidentally, possibly as a suicide.
Some of the things I will remember about the book, in no particular order:
1. You-couldn’t make this up. In the last few months of her father’s life, Alison had revealed to her parents (after going away to college) that she was a lesbian; soon after that she learned that her father was gay, and had been in trouble with the law in the small community in which they lived in Western Pennsylvania for an incident which had been swept under the table by the legal system in return for his agreement to accept counseling. Alison had been under the impression that he had been in trouble for buying beer for a minor, which was the charge that had been actually brought against him. Alison also learned that her mother had been aware of her dad’s tendencies for several years, and two weeks before her father’s demise had filed for divorce from him.
2. Non-linear, recursive structure. The way in which Bechdel retells, in each chapter of the book, with continually increasing detail, shifting themes, and changing perspectives, the story of her relationship with her father, and the way in which she learned more about the events preceding his death.
3. Great use of graphics. The book contains probably a thousand illustrations, many of them extremely detailed. Various bits of the story are told by the captions, by separate text boxes (such as quotations from some of her dad’s favorite books, with significant words and phrases highlighted), by the dialog balloons, and by special little notes within illustrations pointing out visual details significant to Alison’s perception of her surroundings. Here's an example, showing Allison in a lit. course at college.
(click to expand)
which ties in with ...
4. Literary references. Bechdel weaves her dad’s favorite books and authors (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Proust, Joyce) into the story, and uses her own explications of this literature to make key points about his personality and his outlook on life.
5. Honesty. Bechdel doesn’t hold anything back in telling this story, and thus makes a special point of thanking her two brothers and her mother “for not trying to stop me from writing this book.”
and how did I overlook, when I first wrote this ...
6. Emotion. There is some powerful emotion packed into Bechdel's story. As I flipped through the book looking for a good panel to illustrate the review, I perused the last few pages. When I finished, I was sobbing. So ...
I'm looking forward to reading Bechdel’s newest graphic book, Are You My Mother, the story of her relationship with her mother. Though I still haven't read it. It sits there waiting for me.
This is a terrific book.
The graphic memoir format added an extraordinary dimension to the story. (I can't recall ever having read a graphic novel before, so in that sense the entire experience of this book was new to me.)
The book was published when Bechdel was in her mid-40s, and tells the story of her own life, up to just before her twentieth birthday, and her father’s life, up to the same point in time, when he was run over by a truck - possibly accidentally, possibly as a suicide.
Some of the things I will remember about the book, in no particular order:
1. You-couldn’t make this up. In the last few months of her father’s life, Alison had revealed to her parents (after going away to college) that she was a lesbian; soon after that she learned that her father was gay, and had been in trouble with the law in the small community in which they lived in Western Pennsylvania for an incident which had been swept under the table by the legal system in return for his agreement to accept counseling. Alison had been under the impression that he had been in trouble for buying beer for a minor, which was the charge that had been actually brought against him. Alison also learned that her mother had been aware of her dad’s tendencies for several years, and two weeks before her father’s demise had filed for divorce from him.
2. Non-linear, recursive structure. The way in which Bechdel retells, in each chapter of the book, with continually increasing detail, shifting themes, and changing perspectives, the story of her relationship with her father, and the way in which she learned more about the events preceding his death.
3. Great use of graphics. The book contains probably a thousand illustrations, many of them extremely detailed. Various bits of the story are told by the captions, by separate text boxes (such as quotations from some of her dad’s favorite books, with significant words and phrases highlighted), by the dialog balloons, and by special little notes within illustrations pointing out visual details significant to Alison’s perception of her surroundings. Here's an example, showing Allison in a lit. course at college.
(click to expand)
which ties in with ...
4. Literary references. Bechdel weaves her dad’s favorite books and authors (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Proust, Joyce) into the story, and uses her own explications of this literature to make key points about his personality and his outlook on life.
5. Honesty. Bechdel doesn’t hold anything back in telling this story, and thus makes a special point of thanking her two brothers and her mother “for not trying to stop me from writing this book.”
and how did I overlook, when I first wrote this ...
6. Emotion. There is some powerful emotion packed into Bechdel's story. As I flipped through the book looking for a good panel to illustrate the review, I perused the last few pages. When I finished, I was sobbing. So ...
I'm looking forward to reading Bechdel’s newest graphic book, Are You My Mother, the story of her relationship with her mother. Though I still haven't read it. It sits there waiting for me.
June 4, 2017
Here's something I don't get to say very often: I liked the Broadway musical better than the comic.
I decided to reread this after seeing the excellent show, and I had a sharper critique of the book this second time around. I first read Fun Home about six years ago after seeing it on some banned book lists, and, reading rebel that I am, I requested it from the library to see what all the fuss was about. It's a "tragicomic" memoir of Bechdel's childhood and her attempt to better understand her father, a closeted gay man who purportedly committed suicide when Bechdel was in college. Coincidentally, Bechdel had told her parents she was a lesbian a few months before her father was hit by a truck and killed.
This is a sad tale, and I can understand why Bechdel tried so hard to make sense of her childhood. I appreciated her frankness and her stories are memorable, but my criticism is with the writing, which sometimes comes across as stilted. For example, one of the few times she discussed homosexuality with her father before he died, she gave it this awkward caption:
In another scene, she's discussing her father's passion for home renovation and decorating:
Sometimes it seemed as if Bechdel was trying to score an A on a vocabulary test rather than write in a natural voice. Additionally, parts of the book felt like a term paper in Lit class. Bechdel's father was an English teacher and the two shared a love of reading. She includes a lot of literary references in Fun Home, and she went through his books and looked at sentences he had underlined. Writers mentioned include F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Albert Camus, Marcel Proust, Henry James and William Shakespeare, with Bechdel analyzing the plots and characters of their various works and comparing them to her parents. It became a bit self-indulgent and occasionally dragged down the memoir.
I liked most of the artwork, but there were some confusing panels, mostly related to the letters and diary entries included in the book. Bechdel went through an obsessive-compulsive phase as a child, and her behavior included marking up her journal with symbols and writing in code. The book has recreations of those scribblings, in addition to letters in her father's cursive handwriting that are also difficult to read.
Those are my criticisms, but overall I did like this book. You can tell Bechdel is really smart and introspective, and I appreciated her attempt at analyzing the family dynamics. Regarding the controversy over censorship, there are a few drawings of naked women and sexual acts, but I don't find that offensive. It irritates me when forthright books about sexuality get banned, and yet our society seems OK by all the extreme violence in our media and entertainment. (Another heartfelt comic that ended up on banned book lists because of a few sexual drawings was Craig Thompson's Blankets.)
In the end, this is an intelligent book about a dysfunctional family and a woman's coming of age. While I didn't love the author's writing style, it's still a story worth telling.
And if you get the chance, go see the musical "Fun Home." It's fantastic and a really clever adaptation of the book.
Meaningful Quotes
"Sometimes, when things were going well, I think my father actually enjoyed having a family. Or at least, the air of authenticity we lent to his exhibit. A sort of still life with children."
"This embarrassment on my part was a tiny scale model of my father's more fully developed self-loathing. His shame inhabited our house as pervasively and invisibly as the aromatic musk of aging mahogany."
"His bursts of kindness were as incandescent as his tantrums were dark."
"Although I'm good at enumerating my father's flaws, it's hard for me to sustain much anger at him. I expect this is partly because he's dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than for mothers."
"In my earliest memories, dad is a lowering, malevolent presence. His arrival home from work cast a cold pall on the peaceable kingdom where Mom, Christian and I spent our days."
"Dad's death was not a new catastrophe but an old one that had been unfolding very slowly for a long time."
"It was a vicious circle. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew. Our home was like an artists' colony. We ate together, but otherwise were absorbed in our separate pursuits. And in this isolation, our creativity took on an aspect of compulsion."
I decided to reread this after seeing the excellent show, and I had a sharper critique of the book this second time around. I first read Fun Home about six years ago after seeing it on some banned book lists, and, reading rebel that I am, I requested it from the library to see what all the fuss was about. It's a "tragicomic" memoir of Bechdel's childhood and her attempt to better understand her father, a closeted gay man who purportedly committed suicide when Bechdel was in college. Coincidentally, Bechdel had told her parents she was a lesbian a few months before her father was hit by a truck and killed.
With my father's death following so hard on the heels of this doleful coming-out party, I could not help but assume a cause-and-effect relationship.
If I had not felt compelled to share my little sexual discovery, perhaps the semi would have passed without incident four months later.
Why had I told them? I hadn't even had sex with anyone yet. Conversely, my father had been having sex with men for years and not telling anyone.
In a way, you could say that my father's end was my beginning. Or more precisely, that the end of his life coincided with the beginning of my truth.
This is a sad tale, and I can understand why Bechdel tried so hard to make sense of her childhood. I appreciated her frankness and her stories are memorable, but my criticism is with the writing, which sometimes comes across as stilted. For example, one of the few times she discussed homosexuality with her father before he died, she gave it this awkward caption:
I would see my father one more time after this. But we would never discuss our shared predilection again.
In another scene, she's discussing her father's passion for home renovation and decorating:
He was an alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a daedalus of decor.
Sometimes it seemed as if Bechdel was trying to score an A on a vocabulary test rather than write in a natural voice. Additionally, parts of the book felt like a term paper in Lit class. Bechdel's father was an English teacher and the two shared a love of reading. She includes a lot of literary references in Fun Home, and she went through his books and looked at sentences he had underlined. Writers mentioned include F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Albert Camus, Marcel Proust, Henry James and William Shakespeare, with Bechdel analyzing the plots and characters of their various works and comparing them to her parents. It became a bit self-indulgent and occasionally dragged down the memoir.
I liked most of the artwork, but there were some confusing panels, mostly related to the letters and diary entries included in the book. Bechdel went through an obsessive-compulsive phase as a child, and her behavior included marking up her journal with symbols and writing in code. The book has recreations of those scribblings, in addition to letters in her father's cursive handwriting that are also difficult to read.
Those are my criticisms, but overall I did like this book. You can tell Bechdel is really smart and introspective, and I appreciated her attempt at analyzing the family dynamics. Regarding the controversy over censorship, there are a few drawings of naked women and sexual acts, but I don't find that offensive. It irritates me when forthright books about sexuality get banned, and yet our society seems OK by all the extreme violence in our media and entertainment. (Another heartfelt comic that ended up on banned book lists because of a few sexual drawings was Craig Thompson's Blankets.)
In the end, this is an intelligent book about a dysfunctional family and a woman's coming of age. While I didn't love the author's writing style, it's still a story worth telling.
And if you get the chance, go see the musical "Fun Home." It's fantastic and a really clever adaptation of the book.
Meaningful Quotes
"Sometimes, when things were going well, I think my father actually enjoyed having a family. Or at least, the air of authenticity we lent to his exhibit. A sort of still life with children."
"This embarrassment on my part was a tiny scale model of my father's more fully developed self-loathing. His shame inhabited our house as pervasively and invisibly as the aromatic musk of aging mahogany."
"His bursts of kindness were as incandescent as his tantrums were dark."
"Although I'm good at enumerating my father's flaws, it's hard for me to sustain much anger at him. I expect this is partly because he's dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than for mothers."
"In my earliest memories, dad is a lowering, malevolent presence. His arrival home from work cast a cold pall on the peaceable kingdom where Mom, Christian and I spent our days."
"Dad's death was not a new catastrophe but an old one that had been unfolding very slowly for a long time."
"It was a vicious circle. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew. Our home was like an artists' colony. We ate together, but otherwise were absorbed in our separate pursuits. And in this isolation, our creativity took on an aspect of compulsion."
December 7, 2023
There's this moment in Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale where fifteen year old Elena gets a letter from her friend Lila. Elena is a diligent straight-A student, and Lila has been forced to drop out of school years ago. But Elena realises, to her horror, that Lila is a much better writer than she is. Her unique voice comes straight off the page: it's like listening to her talk. Elena feels everything she's ever written, every well-composed essay that her teachers have praised in class, is stilted and awkward in comparison. There's no life in them.
Well, reading Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is a bit like that. Bechdel ignores all the rules. It's a YA graphic novel, but it's written in a densely allusive literary style. It's impeccably tasteful, but it contains explicit images of young dykes getting it on with each other. It's a comedy, but some of the funniest bits are about her beloved father's suicide at the age of 43.
Most impressively, none of it feels forced, none of it feels like someone trying to impress you with their cleverness. There are many references to Proust, and Bechdel seems to have effortlessly internalised one of the key lessons of la Recherche: just do what you find interesting, don't worry if no one else understands. Though I think she has not had to wait as long as Proust did for the world to catch up with her.
Like Elena, I look at Fun Home and think: Damn. I don't know how to write at all, do I?
Well, reading Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is a bit like that. Bechdel ignores all the rules. It's a YA graphic novel, but it's written in a densely allusive literary style. It's impeccably tasteful, but it contains explicit images of young dykes getting it on with each other. It's a comedy, but some of the funniest bits are about her beloved father's suicide at the age of 43.
Most impressively, none of it feels forced, none of it feels like someone trying to impress you with their cleverness. There are many references to Proust, and Bechdel seems to have effortlessly internalised one of the key lessons of la Recherche: just do what you find interesting, don't worry if no one else understands. Though I think she has not had to wait as long as Proust did for the world to catch up with her.
Like Elena, I look at Fun Home and think: Damn. I don't know how to write at all, do I?
August 17, 2020
This is my first proper graphic novel and is part of a reading challenge for this year. It’s by Alison Bechdel and I hadn’t initially realised I knew her name from the Bechdel test. This is a way of looking at the way women are portrayed in fiction and film. The test is whether a work features at least two women talking to each other about something other than a man. This goes back to Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own:
“All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. ... And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. ... They are now and then mothers and daughters.”
This is a coming of age tale about Bechdel’s own childhood and adolescence and especially her relationship with her father who died just after she came out as a lesbian whilst at college. The structure of the whole is quite complex and Bechdel has described it as a labyrinth, "going over the same material, but starting from the outside and spiraling in to the center of the story." Bechdel’s father, Bruce, was an English teacher and part time undertaker, who it transpires was gay (having relationships with young men, sometimes his students). The thread running through it all is literature and the way Bechdel uses it in the memoir, this for me, was the strongest part of the book.
Bechdel weaves in a number of works in a way that does not feel forced or contrived. It is quite likely that Bechdel’s father took his own life and this provides one of the focuses as Bechdel looks at Camus and suicide. She also has a lot of fun with Joyce, Ulysses and the Greek myths, looking at fathers (spiritual and temporal). Colette is inevitably referenced with an exploration of the homosexual milieu, as of course is Wilde. Fitzgerald and Shakespeare figure as does Proust. It’s all clever and interesting stuff and is well written.
We learn very little about Bechdel’s mother or siblings, the focus is on her father and their relationship and on her own growing awareness of her own sexuality. At times the young Bechdel does appear a little self-aware, but this is a minor niggle. On the whole I enjoyed this and it was well written and put together and made me think.
“All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. ... And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. ... They are now and then mothers and daughters.”
This is a coming of age tale about Bechdel’s own childhood and adolescence and especially her relationship with her father who died just after she came out as a lesbian whilst at college. The structure of the whole is quite complex and Bechdel has described it as a labyrinth, "going over the same material, but starting from the outside and spiraling in to the center of the story." Bechdel’s father, Bruce, was an English teacher and part time undertaker, who it transpires was gay (having relationships with young men, sometimes his students). The thread running through it all is literature and the way Bechdel uses it in the memoir, this for me, was the strongest part of the book.
Bechdel weaves in a number of works in a way that does not feel forced or contrived. It is quite likely that Bechdel’s father took his own life and this provides one of the focuses as Bechdel looks at Camus and suicide. She also has a lot of fun with Joyce, Ulysses and the Greek myths, looking at fathers (spiritual and temporal). Colette is inevitably referenced with an exploration of the homosexual milieu, as of course is Wilde. Fitzgerald and Shakespeare figure as does Proust. It’s all clever and interesting stuff and is well written.
We learn very little about Bechdel’s mother or siblings, the focus is on her father and their relationship and on her own growing awareness of her own sexuality. At times the young Bechdel does appear a little self-aware, but this is a minor niggle. On the whole I enjoyed this and it was well written and put together and made me think.
January 24, 2022
This book made me deeply uncomfortable.
Trigger Warning: this review contains discussion of child sexual abuse.
Fun Home is a memoir in graphic novel form, centering Alison Bechdel's coming of age, struggles with her sexual identity, and her father, who committed suicide when she was 20 years old.
Alison finds out after her dad dies that he was gay. Ok, cool.... She also finds out that he was a pedophile, and had sex with many of his high school students and several of the family's male teenage babysitters.
Obviously not so cool.
My problem with this book was that Alison Bechdel seems to inexplicably lump these two things together, and at several points in this book excuses her father's behavior and acts like he was just deeply misunderstood and not a child sexual predator.
For example, at one point the author finds naked photos of one of her childhood babysitters (who is a minor) taken by her father. She looks at the photograph and says "perhaps I identify with my father's illicit awe," referring to the "beauty" of the photograph and the babysitter's "sexiness."
And she acts like, oh wow, he was living this secret, erotic life as a homosexual and completely glazes over the fact that these boys her father was having sex with were minors.
By essentially putting her father's homosexuality and pedophilia in the same category, this author is perpetuating EXTREMELY harmful and negative stereotypes about gay men.
This is a no from me.
Trigger Warning: this review contains discussion of child sexual abuse.
Fun Home is a memoir in graphic novel form, centering Alison Bechdel's coming of age, struggles with her sexual identity, and her father, who committed suicide when she was 20 years old.
Alison finds out after her dad dies that he was gay. Ok, cool.... She also finds out that he was a pedophile, and had sex with many of his high school students and several of the family's male teenage babysitters.
Obviously not so cool.
My problem with this book was that Alison Bechdel seems to inexplicably lump these two things together, and at several points in this book excuses her father's behavior and acts like he was just deeply misunderstood and not a child sexual predator.
For example, at one point the author finds naked photos of one of her childhood babysitters (who is a minor) taken by her father. She looks at the photograph and says "perhaps I identify with my father's illicit awe," referring to the "beauty" of the photograph and the babysitter's "sexiness."
And she acts like, oh wow, he was living this secret, erotic life as a homosexual and completely glazes over the fact that these boys her father was having sex with were minors.
By essentially putting her father's homosexuality and pedophilia in the same category, this author is perpetuating EXTREMELY harmful and negative stereotypes about gay men.
This is a no from me.
January 7, 2019
just insert "Fun Home" in place of "House of Leaves" in Mickey's review:
This book looks at you with this smug fucking smile on its face, daring you to say that you don't like it, knowing that masses of people are going to go along with it because they don't want to look stupid. That's what this is. It's the fucking Radiohead of books. Well, House of Leaves, I am not stupid and I'm calling your bullshit. Fuck you
This book looks at you with this smug fucking smile on its face, daring you to say that you don't like it, knowing that masses of people are going to go along with it because they don't want to look stupid. That's what this is. It's the fucking Radiohead of books. Well, House of Leaves, I am not stupid and I'm calling your bullshit. Fuck you
September 30, 2016
Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/
Confession time: The only reason I read Fun Home was because it was on the list of most challenged or banned books last year, I had already read more than half of the others on the list and there was a snowball’s chance in hell I’d opt to read The Bible for pleasure.
I had also never heard of Alison Bechdel prior to snatching this one up from the library display (such a badass, right????) and had to Google “The Bechdel Test” to find out WTF it was. And after doing so?????
Yowza. (And please note the irony of my first Bechdel experience being ALLLLLLLLLL about her father – A MAN.)
I’m also someone who can’t help but question the level of narcissism required for a fairly non-famous person (on the scale from obscurity to Kardashian) to think their life story is that which others would want to read. Thus was the case when I was reading this. If you are a bibliophile there is a chance you will get wrapped up in the name dropping of Fitzgerald and Joyce and Hemingway and Salinger, but if you are a not-so-bright schmuck like myself (or especially this week maybe a teenager attempting to push the envelope by reading something that has been challenged), you might find your reaction to be more along these lines . . . .
Confession time: The only reason I read Fun Home was because it was on the list of most challenged or banned books last year, I had already read more than half of the others on the list and there was a snowball’s chance in hell I’d opt to read The Bible for pleasure.
I had also never heard of Alison Bechdel prior to snatching this one up from the library display (such a badass, right????) and had to Google “The Bechdel Test” to find out WTF it was. And after doing so?????
Yowza. (And please note the irony of my first Bechdel experience being ALLLLLLLLLL about her father – A MAN.)
I’m also someone who can’t help but question the level of narcissism required for a fairly non-famous person (on the scale from obscurity to Kardashian) to think their life story is that which others would want to read. Thus was the case when I was reading this. If you are a bibliophile there is a chance you will get wrapped up in the name dropping of Fitzgerald and Joyce and Hemingway and Salinger, but if you are a not-so-bright schmuck like myself (or especially this week maybe a teenager attempting to push the envelope by reading something that has been challenged), you might find your reaction to be more along these lines . . . .
February 21, 2016
Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is the third comic I have read which is meant exclusively for adults (after The Complete Persepolis and Maus, I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History & Maus, II: And Here My Troubles Began). I must say that out of the three, this one is the most brilliantly drawn and narrated. The three stars are a personal thing.
Alison is a lesbian. This book is an attempt on her part to come to terms with the fact that her father was gay, and possibly a paedophile, something which she could not discuss with him properly before he died in an accident (hit by a truck while crossing the road) at the age of forty-four. Alison shares a bond with her father because of their shared "queer"-ness; perhaps the only bond, as their home was never properly a home, just a bunch of people living together in a domicile with no emotional connection.
Ms. Bechdel's father was an English teacher and a renovator and decorator of houses. His obsessive attachment to objects can be seen as an attempt to distance himself emotionally from his family - it may be that he was ashamed of his sexual preferences: a member of his generation could not "come out" in the way Alison could (and did). However, he connects to Alison through a shared and obsessive love of the written word.
Mr. Bechdel's death might have been a suicide - his daughter fantasises it may be, through the fact that a divorce was imminent and the books he was reading just before his death and the literary "clues" he left lying about pointed to the same(Camus' A Happy Death, for example). In fact, this whole book is an attempt by the author to explain her troubled relationship with her family and society in general through epoch-making novels - mainly The Great Gatsby, In Search of Lost Time and Ulysses.
The "Fun Home" of the title is a funeral parlour Mr. Bechdel inherited from his parents: a building filled with cadavers and caskets, where the human body becomes just a lump of flesh to be laid out on a slab and carved (one graphic sequence involving Alison her father and a naked corpse is very powerful). This also becomes a metaphor for Alson's home as the story progresses: only here, it is the souls which are given such cavalier treatment.
Alison Bechdel's art and narrative are fantastic, with layer upon layer of meaning rarely seen in a comic book. The interspersion of literary passages, historical and geographical allusions and personal memoirs is done with consummate mastery, so that the main theme of the book is always in the limelight. And the panels are drawn with a lot of thought given to the exact layout so that the pictures enhance the flow of the narrative seamlessly.
But I somehow could not connect with the story or the characters: maybe because of my sexual preferences, I could not empathise with the protagonist or her concerns. Like I said in the beginning, the three stars are a personal thing.
Warning: the book contains some graphic sexual material.
Alison is a lesbian. This book is an attempt on her part to come to terms with the fact that her father was gay, and possibly a paedophile, something which she could not discuss with him properly before he died in an accident (hit by a truck while crossing the road) at the age of forty-four. Alison shares a bond with her father because of their shared "queer"-ness; perhaps the only bond, as their home was never properly a home, just a bunch of people living together in a domicile with no emotional connection.
Ms. Bechdel's father was an English teacher and a renovator and decorator of houses. His obsessive attachment to objects can be seen as an attempt to distance himself emotionally from his family - it may be that he was ashamed of his sexual preferences: a member of his generation could not "come out" in the way Alison could (and did). However, he connects to Alison through a shared and obsessive love of the written word.
Mr. Bechdel's death might have been a suicide - his daughter fantasises it may be, through the fact that a divorce was imminent and the books he was reading just before his death and the literary "clues" he left lying about pointed to the same(Camus' A Happy Death, for example). In fact, this whole book is an attempt by the author to explain her troubled relationship with her family and society in general through epoch-making novels - mainly The Great Gatsby, In Search of Lost Time and Ulysses.
The "Fun Home" of the title is a funeral parlour Mr. Bechdel inherited from his parents: a building filled with cadavers and caskets, where the human body becomes just a lump of flesh to be laid out on a slab and carved (one graphic sequence involving Alison her father and a naked corpse is very powerful). This also becomes a metaphor for Alson's home as the story progresses: only here, it is the souls which are given such cavalier treatment.
Alison Bechdel's art and narrative are fantastic, with layer upon layer of meaning rarely seen in a comic book. The interspersion of literary passages, historical and geographical allusions and personal memoirs is done with consummate mastery, so that the main theme of the book is always in the limelight. And the panels are drawn with a lot of thought given to the exact layout so that the pictures enhance the flow of the narrative seamlessly.
But I somehow could not connect with the story or the characters: maybe because of my sexual preferences, I could not empathise with the protagonist or her concerns. Like I said in the beginning, the three stars are a personal thing.
Warning: the book contains some graphic sexual material.
April 13, 2020
Graphic novels are outside my comfort zone; I'm never sure where to rest my eyes on the page. But, I'm so glad I read this one! Bechdel eloquently conveys her confusion around her sexuality as well as her complicated relationship with her father. I loved the frequent literary references. There is a sadness and tenderness that runs through the pages - more tragedy than comedy.
July 3, 2015
A graphic novel memoir about a girl who grows up with a repressed, homosexual father and later comes out as a lesbian, only to have her dad die a few days later - how different. In Fun Home Bechdel illustrates and writes about living in a dysfunctional, Victorian house, and she includes an abundance of literary references within a nonlinear format. But she focuses this seven-year effort on her father, a man who displays enough complexity to evoke sympathy despite his darker sides.
I almost never read graphic novels, and I did not expect the psychological tour de force of Fun Home at all. Through detailed and impressive graphics Bechdel delineates her coming of age, a journey filled with uncomfortable experiences and nuanced life lessons. The amount of retrieval and introspection this work must have required of her amazes me. It delves into imperfect parents, fluid sexuality, and the messy quality of the human psyche overall. It serves as one of the most standout books on the college syllabi given to me thus far.
Highly recommended for fans of unique - and I mean it when I say unique, not just as a throwaway adjective - memoirs told through an unusual medium. Even if you usually avoid pictures, I'd pick this one up, if only to try it out for a chapter or two.
I almost never read graphic novels, and I did not expect the psychological tour de force of Fun Home at all. Through detailed and impressive graphics Bechdel delineates her coming of age, a journey filled with uncomfortable experiences and nuanced life lessons. The amount of retrieval and introspection this work must have required of her amazes me. It delves into imperfect parents, fluid sexuality, and the messy quality of the human psyche overall. It serves as one of the most standout books on the college syllabi given to me thus far.
Highly recommended for fans of unique - and I mean it when I say unique, not just as a throwaway adjective - memoirs told through an unusual medium. Even if you usually avoid pictures, I'd pick this one up, if only to try it out for a chapter or two.
December 5, 2012
I wonder pretty often what the point of writing books is, mostly because, well, you know, there are already so many of them...
More narrowly, I think I kind of understand why people feel compelled to write memoirs, but I do wonder -- as I remain stalled out on page 236 of Martin Amis's Experience -- why anyone ever reads them.
Fun Home answers both of these questions for me, plus a third larger one about what the point is of being alive. It seems like sort of a confusing and overwhelming waste sometimes, doesn't it? All the complexity and pain and even the great gorgeous moments in a life, because what's it all for, what's its purpose...? Can any sense or use ever be made of it really?
A: Yup!
I've been meaning to read this since it came out six years ago, and just finally got around to it. Fun Home blew my mind in that way that makes me want to devolve to swooningly banal reviewspeak and pronounce it a "stunning achievement."
Fun Home is a Stunning Achievement. I feel like I don't need to describe it because pretty much everyone else on the planet has read it by now, but in case you somehow didn't, it's a memoir written in comic form focusing primarily on Bechdel's relationship with her father, who probably (but not definitely) killed himself, following decades of small-town life as a passionate house restorer/English teacher/funeral home proprietor/tormented closet case, shortly after his daughter's announcement that she was gay. In the book, Bechdel analyzes her memories, experiences and extant documents, and uses literature to try to understand her father and tell a story about her family and about herself.
The result was so engaging and so just, well this is dumb, but meaningful that I'm really at a loss for anything unstupid to say. While reading this, I kept thinking that I was glad in a way that a lot of these things happened, that these people were who they were, because that's what led to this book being made and I was so happy to read it. From the opening pages I was so overwhelmed by her drawings and descriptions of her family's house that the book seemed almost magical to me for containing them -- sort of like, without this book, what would have been the point of that house, what would have been the point of this time period, of all these people? They all just would've come and gone, and been known by such a small number of individuals who would've eventually forgotten them. There is some process of retrieval at work here that grants these lost settings and people and events some existence that feels so vital -- it's like Proust, one of the literary references she explores, how she goes back in time to collect them -- that it's actually kind of transcendent. I'm not explaining it clearly at all, but this process is what I think art's for: making something out of the world that grants that world some extra sense or meaning beyond itself.
Though man... Faulkner wrote that "If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies," but I bet Faulkner never knew an autobiographical comic book artist! If he had, she probably would've made him blush and stammer a bit, but I'm sure in the end he would've stood by his statement. If I were in Bechdel's family, I might've gotten pretty pissed about this, though I like to imagine I'd be consoled by the incredible value of the product to which my privacy had been sacrificed.
Anyway, yeah. Not much of a review but hopefully my enthusiasm's come across. While in theory I know not everyone would love this book nearly as much as I did, I'd still unreservedly recommend it to pretty much anyone.
More narrowly, I think I kind of understand why people feel compelled to write memoirs, but I do wonder -- as I remain stalled out on page 236 of Martin Amis's Experience -- why anyone ever reads them.
Fun Home answers both of these questions for me, plus a third larger one about what the point is of being alive. It seems like sort of a confusing and overwhelming waste sometimes, doesn't it? All the complexity and pain and even the great gorgeous moments in a life, because what's it all for, what's its purpose...? Can any sense or use ever be made of it really?
A: Yup!
I've been meaning to read this since it came out six years ago, and just finally got around to it. Fun Home blew my mind in that way that makes me want to devolve to swooningly banal reviewspeak and pronounce it a "stunning achievement."
Fun Home is a Stunning Achievement. I feel like I don't need to describe it because pretty much everyone else on the planet has read it by now, but in case you somehow didn't, it's a memoir written in comic form focusing primarily on Bechdel's relationship with her father, who probably (but not definitely) killed himself, following decades of small-town life as a passionate house restorer/English teacher/funeral home proprietor/tormented closet case, shortly after his daughter's announcement that she was gay. In the book, Bechdel analyzes her memories, experiences and extant documents, and uses literature to try to understand her father and tell a story about her family and about herself.
The result was so engaging and so just, well this is dumb, but meaningful that I'm really at a loss for anything unstupid to say. While reading this, I kept thinking that I was glad in a way that a lot of these things happened, that these people were who they were, because that's what led to this book being made and I was so happy to read it. From the opening pages I was so overwhelmed by her drawings and descriptions of her family's house that the book seemed almost magical to me for containing them -- sort of like, without this book, what would have been the point of that house, what would have been the point of this time period, of all these people? They all just would've come and gone, and been known by such a small number of individuals who would've eventually forgotten them. There is some process of retrieval at work here that grants these lost settings and people and events some existence that feels so vital -- it's like Proust, one of the literary references she explores, how she goes back in time to collect them -- that it's actually kind of transcendent. I'm not explaining it clearly at all, but this process is what I think art's for: making something out of the world that grants that world some extra sense or meaning beyond itself.
Though man... Faulkner wrote that "If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies," but I bet Faulkner never knew an autobiographical comic book artist! If he had, she probably would've made him blush and stammer a bit, but I'm sure in the end he would've stood by his statement. If I were in Bechdel's family, I might've gotten pretty pissed about this, though I like to imagine I'd be consoled by the incredible value of the product to which my privacy had been sacrificed.
Anyway, yeah. Not much of a review but hopefully my enthusiasm's come across. While in theory I know not everyone would love this book nearly as much as I did, I'd still unreservedly recommend it to pretty much anyone.
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