Book Review: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Title: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Author: Alison Bechdel
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Rating: 4 out of 5
Format: Print
I bought my copy of Fun Home at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, a riotous celebration of the comic arts that happens at the Toronto Reference Library every May. This was around the same time that the book’s sequel, Are You My Mother? was published.
About the book: Alison Bechdel’s father Bruce was a high school English teacher, a funeral home operator, and a man who worked tirelessly to restore his Victorian-era home to its original glory. He was a husband and father of three children. On the outside, the Bechdels were a functional nuclear family. However, soon after Bechdel came out to her parents, she learned her father was also gay and that he had sexual relationships with his students.
Months after her announcement, her mother filed for divorce – and two weeks after that, her father got run over by a truck.
Was it an accident? Was it suicide? Bechdel thinks it was the latter, and in Fun Home, she analyzes her memories, books, and family letters in an attempt to understand who Bruce was and why he chose a life that dissatisfied him so deeply.
What I liked: Bechdel’s analysis of her and her father’s lives, and her ability to wed it to distinct visuals, was inventive and involving. I remember one page in particular where she mapped out the places where her father was born, lived, and died, and circumscribed the area within one tidy circle to reveal that all of these important things happened within one mile’s distance of each other. The narrative loops back and forth upon itself, and parcels out new information at a measured pace, showing the readers new facets of the same story as it progresses. I appreciated Bechdel’s depth of focus in both her writing and her visuals – nearly everything is in its right place. I admire how much effort went into writing and drawing something so emotionally painful, and how much more effort went into making it all look seamless.
What I disliked: I don’t know if this trait was also visible in her long-running comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For” but Fun Home‘s authorial voice was depressingly distant. The language Bechdel used to describe her family, her thoughts, and her experiences was detached and clinical. I understand that this is supposed to reflect her own experience of growing up within such a singular household – indeed, Bechdel herself is quite aware of how distant she sounds – but it still left me uneasy. On top of that, all of the interwoven references to the canon of Western literature were so dense that without the author’s explanations on how these stories fit into her own life I would have been lost.
The verdict: Fun Home genuinely challenged me in a way unlike nearly any other book I’ve read so far in 2012. Part of me was grateful that my family was never that repressed and dysfunctional. Part of me couldn’t fathom how another person could feel so detached from their father’s death. But another part of me was acutely aware of how little I knew and understood about classical literature. I was intimidated when I read it, because it felt chock full of references both visual and textual that were extremely cultured and beyond my comprehension. This was the first book I read this year where I put it down feeling that I needed to read it over again to truly understand it.
Up next: Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord
Correction, July 8th: I originally stated in my review that Alison Bechdel learned her dad was gay only after he died. However, she learned this soon after she came out to her parents, months before his death. The “About the book” section has been updated accordingly.
