Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison BechdelMariner Books, 2007 (Originally Houghton Mifflin, 2006)

I’m not sure why it took me so long to get around to reading Fun Home, given that I tend to like graphic memoirs, but I’m pleased that my boyfriend had it checked out of the library and finished it before it was due, which gave me time to read it, too. It’s an engrossing and quick read, and I liked both the art and the story. Bechdel uses numerous literary references to explore her relationship with her father (who died when she was in college in circumstances that may have been accidental, or may not have been) and to tell her own coming-of-age/coming-out story, which is intertwined with her father’s story, too (after she came out, she learned that he had had male lovers). I like how many texts, of various sorts, Bechdel includes in this book: we get snippets of her father’s letters to her mother during their courtship, and his letters to Bechdel herself when she’s at college, and Bechdel’s letters home, and her childhood diary entries, and books from Dr. Spock to Ulysses to James and the Giant Peach. Both of Bechdel’s parents were high school English teachers, so the literary allusions feel particularly apt; her father also ran the funeral home he inherited from his father—which Bechdel and her brothers called the “Fun Home.” So: this is a story about death and secrets and the silences/distances in Bechdel’s family during her childhood, and her own experiences and reactions to them. She writes about her father’s passion for gardening, and for restoring their historic home, and how she resented the way he “treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture” (14). She writes about how her childhood “home was like an artists’ colony,” where the family “ate together but otherwise were absorbed in [their] separate pursuits” (134). She writes about her experiences with obsessive-compulsive disorder at age ten, and her silent identification with a butch woman she sees at a diner when she’s four or five, and about having only seen her parents be physically affectionate twice. (I liked the scenes where Bechdel draws herself with her first girlfriend, Joan, including the scenes where they’re in bed together—the frankness and sweetness and humor of their relationship provides a contrast to the mysteries of Bechdel’s father’s sexuality and the dysfunction of her parents’ marriage.)