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.

Quiz time: Name three things that Alison Bechdel (author/cartoonist behind the fabulous "Dykes To Watch Out For") had in common with Claire, the daughter on "Six Feet Under". Answer: They both had two brothers, their fathers were killed by being hit by a large motor vehicle, and both grew up living in the family funeral home.

In Alison's case, the kids shortened the name of the latter to the "Fun Home", which she had made the title of her beautifully illustrated autobiographical work. It deals mostly with her relationship with her father, a fastidious and seemingly cold and distant man who inherited the family funderal business, although he also worked as a high school English teacher. His main passion, however, was restoring and decorating period buildings in their small Pennsylvania town, first the town museum and later a big gothic mansion in which he moved his family during the renovations. Alison's mother was also emotionally distant, and the family members rarely showed any affection toward each other, a burden that Alison dealt with throughout her life. It wasn't until was in college and discovered her lesbianism, and wrote home to tell her parents about it, that she was clued in on a secret his parents had been trying to hide all those years: her father was also gay, and the changing cast of students and other young men he had around him as "helpers" for the renovations were really his lovers. This revelation triggers a new attempt to get closer to him, and she does manage that to an extent, right before his accident, which she believes was really a premeditated act of suicide.

A heartfelt and emotionally powerful story, told with great feeling and honesty by a talented author. I had some doubts about dealing with a self-described "tragicomic" (the book is fully illustrated with six panels per each of the 232 pages), but the author is apparently so comfortable with that medium that it allows her to tell her story to its best, and provides amazing detail and clarity to the events she relates. Five stars out of five.

[Copied from my Goodreads review] You've probably heard of Alison Bechdel thanks to something used in film criticism called the Bechdel Test. For a film to pass the test it need to feature (1) at least two named female characters who (2) talk to each other about (3) something other than a man. Sadly, a lot of movies don't pass this simple three-question test...

I had fun reading Fun home: A Family Tragicomic and checking to see if Bechdel's graphic memoir passed her eponymous test. It took a lot longer than I thought it would, but that's probably just because the test is meant to check films that feature a lot of dialogue and not graphic novels with a lot of narration.

Fun Home tells the story of Bechdel's relationship with her father with plenty of literary allusions (Icarus, The Great Gatsby, what seems to be the entire works of James Joyce). There's also a wide overarching theme of sexuality due to both Alison and her father being gay. The novel is by no means chronological, but as the story continues you revisit scenes with new knowledge.

Bruce (Alison's father) was a closeted high school English teacher and funeral director (who worked at a FUNeral HOME, get it?) who obsesses over restoring the Bechdel house to its Victorian glory. Helen (Alison's mother) worked on her dissertation whenever she wasn't acting in local theatrical productions (that often lent themselves to having themes pertinent to Alison or her parents' lives).

It's in college that Alison realizes she's a lesbian and shortly after coming out to her parents, she finds out that her parents are getting a divorce because of her own father's homosexualtiy. While Alison and her father could have used their shared queerness to grow closer, fate (or her father's decision to kill himself) prevented that from happening. Just weeks after news of the divorce comes out, Bruce is killed by a Sunbeam delivery truck. The official ruling was after crossing the road, something like a snake in the grass caused him to jump backwards into the path of the truck, but Alison thinks he may have backed into the road on purpose. Many parts of the story focus on Alison wondering if her own coming out may have caused her father to commit suicide.

The story and artwork were all very nice. The literary allusions were a little overbearing. Most of them went over my head; I feel like there should be a Cliffs Notes companion pamphlet sold with this to explain most of the connections. What I really want to do now is watch the Broadway musical adaptation of this story. Ever since I saw Sydney Lucas destroy at last year's Tony Awards with "Ring of Keys" I wanted to see what this musical was about. I'm glad I read the novel first but I can't imagine how different everything would be on stage.

This is a graphic novel. I am not habituated to the format, and in a few I have read in the past have had difficulty balancing my attention between the words and pictures. Here, that was not the case. Bechdel balances serious and often detached out-of-panel sentences with engaging drawings and dialogue. The panels contribute a different element, not always illustrating what is written above or below them, creating a dynamic dual-tone. As I, with my limited exposure, understand, it is unusual to write deep reflective analysis to tell the story around the panels which show the story.

The novel is a testament to her father, and she leaves no part of him, or her own emotions about each part of their relationship, unexplored. She presents him in his entirety: the good, the bad, the disturbing, the endearing. Through reading it I could feel her love of him, and because of this sympathy I found myself not wanting to remember his baser acts. One scene expresses her frustration at the dishonest portrayal of people at funerals, where people feel that only good can be spoken about the person. She would rather have a brutally honest representation to show all her father’s flaws and all the love he received anyway. This is what this book is.

The characters are all very real. I was able to get a full idea of the father, and all the secondary characters acted believably. Of course, it is an autobiography. More than that, all of them are portrayed through compelling details, and every scene shown feels significant. The story is not told chronologically, rather it jumps between scenes relevant to each chapter’s theme. This allows every idea to be explored entirely when it is first introduced, rather than hoping it will stay in the mind of the reader until it is addressed again. Together, they paint a rich, full picture. As the story nears its end, many moments resurface, each for a single panel, drawing everything together. This pattern builds to a climax until the final scene, which is one continuous and simple moment. I had been expecting some grand finale, and the solitary scene was not quite enough. I did not feel the significance the author was trying to attribute to it. This stood out more because I had not felt that the rest of the book fell short, and the ending must, by placement, be particularly meaningful.

The balance of text and image, good and bad, was masterfully executed. My only complaint is that the ending panels did not live up to the resonance of the rest of the book. I rate this book 8/10.

When it was published in 2006, Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home received rave reviews from critics, with many major media outlets placing it on their annual ten-best lists. I am a lifelong comics fan and a firm believer in the graphic novel as literature. That said, the confessional memoir is one category of graphic storytelling that has never appealed to me much. Such books tend to be exercises in excessive self-indulgent navel-gazing. Although Fun Home is skillfully written and drawn, it has done little to improve my opinion of the genre.

In Fun Home, Bechdel explores her relationship with her father. She begins by detailing his obsessive devotion to the interior decoration of the family’s home, which also serves as a funeral parlor. In addition to being a mortician, Mr. Bechdel is an English teacher, and a love of literature is one quality that father and daughter share. Mr. Bechdel has restored the family’s historic home with laborious care, creating an environment like something from a Victorian novel, yet the house’s ornate, picturesque facade masks the dysfunctional dynamics of the family who dwells within. The father is a distant, cold man who keeps secrets from his children. Shortly before his death, the adult Alison, a lesbian, discovers that her father was gay and had affairs with a number of men, some of whom she knew. When her father is struck by a truck and killed, the author asserts­—not entirely convincingly—that his death was a suicide.

The art, printed in black and blue ink, is capably done, but as a graphic storyteller, Bechdel doesn’t rank among the greats. The figures are a little too simplistic, and the deadpan facial expressions can’t quite pull off the emotion the story requires, but Bechdel’s knack for detailed background scenery is admirable and does much to draw the reader into the narrative. I think it’s safe to say, however, that the prose is the main attraction here, not the illustration.

Fun Home has been the target of censorship in the form of bannings from libraries and schools. Any assertion that the book is pornography is unfounded; it is a bona fide work of art and literature. However, just because it deals with controversial subject matter doesn’t make it a landmark in the history of the graphic novel. The story just isn’t that compelling. Bechdel’s coming-of-age as a lesbian may be inspirational to some, and there are some touching moments when she and her father connect, but they are few and far between. One might argue that the only thing particularly interesting about this memoir is that the two main characters are gay. Beyond that, it’s just another story about a bad dad who cheats. To overcompensate for this, Bechdel draws parallels between her family’s story and great works of literature, including Marcel’s Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Homer’s Odyssey. That may explain why it was such a critics’ darling, but it comes across as a pretentious dressing up of a mildly interesting personal narrative in high-brow literary trappings. As Bechdel admits at one point in the book, “Maybe I’m trying to render my senseless personal loss meaningful by linking it, however posthumously, to a more coherent narrative.” Bingo. Fun Home is not bad, but one expects more from a book that has had so many golden laurels heaped upon it.