CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED, NATIONAL BESTSELLER Time Magazine #1 Book of the Year • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist •
Winner of the Stonewall Book Award • Double finalist for the Lambda Book Award •
Nominated for the GLAAD Media Award
Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir that charts her fraught relationship with her late father.
Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the "Fun Home." It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.
In her hands, personal history becomes a work of amazing subtlety and power, written with controlled force and enlivened with humor, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail.
★★★★☆
In this graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel gives readers a glimpse into her unique and sometimes challenging upbringing. While her father continued on in the family mortuary business, business as a whole was too slow for the small town where they were located, so he supplemented the family income with a job as a 12th grade English teacher. The funeral home, which also doubled as the family home, was playfully dubbed "Fun Home".
It was here that Bechdel and her siblings grew up playing among the floor model caskets and stealing glimpses of the town deceased before a service. Alison illustrates the strained relationship she often had with her father --- while there were good times, there were also plenty of moments of confusing emotional distance or short-temperedness. Bechdel's father becomes obsessed with renovating their fixer-upper home to pristine, historically accurate condition, filling it up with valuable antiques that everyone was expected to tiptoe around. The family living space becomes near-impossible to live in comfortably, for fear of setting off father's wrath.
Bechdel makes comparisons between her father and the Greek story of Daedalus, "Daedalus was indifferent to the human cost of his projects...something vital was missing... an elasticity, a margin for error." Years later, a college-age Bechdel comes out to her parents. A follow-up conversation with her mother down the road brings up the revelation that Bechdel's father was also gay. Not long after all this information is aired, her father passes away, a sudden hit-and-run victim. Coming home for the funeral pushes Bechdel to wade through a mountain of conflicting emotions surrounding her childhood and the years since.
If you're used to the pace of action-based graphic novels, then understand that this, being a memoir, won't be on that setting. But if, in your overall novel reading, you're generally down for a good character study, this is a pretty decent read. Not necessarily gripping, but a lot of interesting topics and relatable emotions, if you yourself are well acquainted with the dysfunctional family environment.
Even with some of the heavier themes --- there is repeated mention of depression & suicidal thought --- Bechdel does include some laughs. I got a giggle out of the mention of being compared to Wednesday Addams as a child, as that's something that I myself experienced in my childhood days.
Note to sensitive readers: If you're at all uncomfortable with nudity / sexually explicit content, please be aware that the art within this graphic memoir does include some panels that feature nude dead bodies, depictions of suggested masturbation, female nudity, and oral sex.
Also, if you don't want your childhood memories ruined, please be aware that at one point there is a joke made which sexualizes Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach. LOL
In other reader heads-up notes, there are also spoilers for Henry James' Portrait of a Lady and William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew.
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