Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Love graphics and love memoirs, Alison Bechel had a terrible childhood. Her father was the third generation in the funeral business. It is creepy enough to be around funeral decor and have t0 be very solemn always in public but but little kids having to prep the viewing room with the folding chairs and always be immaculare is a fun part of childhood.

I had the experience of working in the upstair apartment of a funeral home temporarily. My first husband's law practice was there. The wallpaper and carpet were funeral home style. The worst part was that I know where the caskets had been.

Alison's farher was eccentric and a perfectionist, not one to give warm hugs. He had affairs with the men he hired and I will never forgive for demanding help with the embalming of a client. Not much help but just being there with a naked corpse is not a good experience for any child.

This book is one of deeply troubled childhood. The graphics and writing was top notch and now I want to read her book about her mother.

My life doesn't easily afford going out and browsing books at actual bookstores. I can get get out and about if I'm determined, but I seldom have enough energy to be determined.

This means when I want to sample someone's creative work to see if it's something I would actually read or watch all the way through, I have to use ... other means. Let's just pretend I borrowed it from the library.

When I sampled this book, it hooked me so well that I couldn't stop at sampling it. I read the whole thing in one sitting, without even thinking to pause to find out where I could pay her properly for a higher-quality copy that I'd probably appreciate more, because that would take me out of the moment and I didn't want that.

Having finished it, I've come here and made sure Ms. Bechdel gets her due, because she deserves it.

People more eloquent than I have talked about its subject matter and why it's good, but if its description hasn't already turned you off, based on your moral principles, then you're probably compatible with this autobio-graphical-novel and I think you should just pick it up and get started. I'm certain you'll enjoy it too.

TL;DR: Great book; buy it.

I live an hour away from Beech Creek, Alison Bechdel's tiny hometown and the setting for much of her graphic memoir Fun Home. I've always found the area oppressive: dark, looming mountains casting perpetual shadows on impoverished, dying valley towns. But after reading Fun Home, I revisited Beech Creek, to see Bechdel's childhood home and the grave of her father Bruce, and to remind myself of how cruelly ironic life can be.

Bruce Bechdel, a man who loves literature (in his early days he identified with F. Scott Fitzgerald; in his final days he reads Proust), an aesthete with a taste for the baroque detail of the Victorian era, and a creative and versatile designer of interior and exterior landscapes, is born and lives in rural central Pennsylvania, running the family funeral home and teaching at the local high school. He never quite fits in. Always sun-tanned and exquisitely dressed (no plaid hunter's shirts or chewing tobacco for him), persnickety and a bit prissy, but at the same time speaking with a back-country twang, Bruce seems uncannily out of place in Beech Creek.

And he's a closeted gay man, who has occasional affairs on the side and otherwise sublimates his repressed sexuality by obsessively restoring the Victorian-era house in which Alison grew up. The tension of his closeted life makes him aloof, prone to violent temper tantrums, controlling, and sometimes cruel to both wife and children.

Alison's Bechdel's memoir of him, and the way in which her own identity both became the inverse of his and yet in many respects parallels his, is a sophisticated narrative that underscores just how complex personal identity is. Alison is who she is, just as her father was who he was, because of the convergence of Beech Creek, sexuality, alienation, fun, repression, the need to be creative, the yearning for affection, the factuality of history and the re-creation of memory. There's no formulaic happy ending here, no artificial structuring to make more sense of the relationship between herself and her father than there really was. Instead, what the reader is offered is a profound, sensitive, bittersweet effort to explore memory in search of identity--an effort which throughout is punctuated by Bechdel's references to both Proust and James Joyce--and an appreciation for the ironies of fate which make us who we become.

Other reviewers have mentioned that they read the memoir at one setting. I found it so intense that I could only take it in small portions, and even then I sometimes felt overwhelmed. For in sharing her own identity-forming memories with us, she invites us to plumb more deeply into our own. And both exercises, although potentially liberating, can also be harrowing.