Fun Home (2006)

Not the musical, not yet – today’s post is about the graphic memoir on which the musical is based.  This is an excellent book.  It’s intelligent, funny, honest, and heartbreaking, sometimes all at once.  This puts me at three for three when it comes to graphic memoirs (along with Persepolis and Maus.)  One spoiler for a reveal very early in the book.

Fun Home is about author/cartoonist Alison Bechdel (of the Bechdel rule) and her relationship with her father, Bruce.  It paints a picture of her small-town Pennsylvania upbringing, marked by Bruce’s fastidious exactitude.  English teacher, funeral director (Alison and her brothers call the family business the “fun home,” hence the title,) and amateur house restorer, Bruce needs everything just so.  He lives for refinishing floors, carefully alphabetizing bookshelves, and finding the perfect curtains to accent a room.  According to Bechdel, he appreciates his children mainly for “the air of authenticity [they lend] to his exhibit;” any knickknack out of place, any toe over the line, can bring on explosions of rage and physical punishment.

The adult Bechdel, narrating the book, knows what her young self does not, and that hindsight informs her story.  In that small Pennsylvania town in the ‘60s, little Alison and her father are both gay.  While she simply hasn’t figured it out yet, Bruce has been closeted for most of his life.  For all those years, he’s been cultivating a pristine façade of himself.  At least in part, the reason he’s so obsessive and inflexible about the house is because of this desperate need for his image to be above reproach, beyond suspicion.  He tries to force his family into his picturesque ideal because he can’t bear to let on that anything is hidden.  If everything is perfect on the outside, no one will know something is wrong on the inside – that’s likely how it would be perceived if his neighbors knew about his sexuality, but also something wrong in terms of all the energy he exerts to keep himself from the world.

The book starts in Alison’s childhood and goes through her college years, which is when she starts to understand her own sexuality and learns her father’s secret.  It’s set up nonlinearly, so later revelations are threaded through the book’s early sections.  It’s a gripping narrative, intimate and engrossing.  Bechdel deftly moves between bare emotional honesty, almost numbly-detached dark humor, and thoughtful literary references.  It’s like we’re privy to her private decompression, working her way through her fraught relationship with her father and trying to put it in context.  She’s unflinching, showing both the good and bad in stark detail, and the result is a beautifully-written, deeply affecting memoir. 

The drawing is equally effective.  Bechdel illustrates her life with crisp, frank images, capturing the quiet, huge moments happening at the edges of the panels in the midst of the mundane day-to-day.  Additionally, she recreates some of her own personal artifacts:  family photos, childhood diaries, newspaper clippings, and letters, which gives the book a more immediate feeling, always reminding you that this isn’t a story, but a life.

Warnings

Language, sexual content (including masturbation and sex scenes,) violence, drinking, and thematic elements.

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And in other news, new Doctor Who trailer!  Plenty of cool stuff to be had, but only three words you really need to know:  Electric.  Guitar.  Doctor!  Looks like I'll get to cross another item off my Twelfth Doctor wish list (I'd specifically mentioned singing, but this is definitely close enough - electric guitar Doctor FTW!)