Table of Content
Alison had been under the impression that he had been in trouble for buying beer for a minor, which was the charge that had been actually brought against him. Alison also learned that her mother had been aware of her dad’s tendencies for several years, and two weeks before her father’s demise had filed for divorce from him. Her language made me shiver a lot, actually, which is not something I expect from a graphic novel. (But let me reiterate that I've read probably less than a dozen graphic novels in my adult life, so excuse me if that's a stupid assumption.) Her prose is complex, lyrical, intelligent, and apt. Honestly, I have no idea why this is considered such a classic of graphic memoirs.
In the end, I was compelled to pick up Fun Home completely on a whim. Though I flew through it, a lot of the literary references went shamefully over my head. And considering that it was such a big focus here, I was left out of the loop a lot, which ended up lowering my enjoyment while reading. Unlike Bruce Bechdel who grappled with the stark contradiction between his public reality and private urges all his life, my father didn't particularly have any skeletons in his closet. And even if he did I have no way of unraveling that mystery now.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Even the characters are rendered indifferently. Outside of the father, who wears glasses, I have no way of identifying visually how many children there are, or telling them apart from one another. Furthermore, I have no idea whose viewpoint this whole page is supposed to represent.
Not just for people of other sexual orientations, but for kids and wives too, who dared to be a bit different than what social norms say. The more momentum and impact enlightenment and modern education get, the fewer unnecessary tragedies, childhood traumas, and suicides will be caused by stupid, crazy regulations of what one has to be and into what. It was all sweetly sad and worthy, painfully so, all about Alison's father who was this closet gay or bi living the whole of his life in a small Pennsylvanian town. So his temperament ran towards the dour and repressed and the sublimating-everything-into-his-house-restoration and then lo! Alison figures this out and also - double shazam! That she herself is gay, and then they become a lot closer and then stuff happens but not that much stuff.
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Bechdel weaves her dad’s favorite books and authors (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Proust, Joyce) into the story, and uses her own explications of this literature to make key points about his personality and his outlook on life. Fun Home, though well-executed in a lot of ways, was just not compelling to me. It seemed to almost push away emotion with vocabulary and reference, and it felt very cold to me. The method of referencing classic literature to explain Bechdel's life events made them less impactful, to me. The specificity of her experiences and her father's character especially were interesting, and to me, the narrative and the narrative voice were weakened by the way the references made them more universal.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic Read Online
Even without considering the graphic element, the writing is labored verging on tortured. The narration consists of endless confused comparisons of her family's situation to classic literature. I don't object to allusions when they are deployed to refine the writer's own vision of the narrative. But Bechdel's dependence on literary allusions don't feel like attempts to illuminate -- they obscure; they waffle about for a few pages a time before being replaced about by other thin allusions.
Having lost a father at 14, I know how it feels trying to grasp at straws, trying to analyze one seemingly inconsequential incident or subjecting one precious shared moment to intense and concentrated scrutiny from all possible angles. But you know it's just delusional thinking anyway. You will never know him the way you could have.
When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive. I almost never read graphic novels, and I did not expect the psychological tour de force of Fun Home at all. Through detailed and impressive graphics Bechdel delineates her coming of age, a journey filled with uncomfortable experiences and nuanced life lessons. The amount of retrieval and introspection this work must have required of her amazes me.
The coldness of her family home was palpable and mirrored that of the funeral home where her father worked. Other than being indentured servants to their father’s fastidious home decor projects, there were no signs of outright abuse, but the lack of affection would be enough to cause any child psychological problems. It would have been easy for Bechdel to paint her father as the patriarchal tyrant, but she manages to make him somewhat sympathetic. Her ability to find humor in an otherwise grim story and her wonderful artwork kept me wanting to read more. Bechdel has been named a MacArthur Fellow and Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont, among many other honors.
There are times when her eloquence reads more as pompous, but it all works for the kind of story she tells. Similarly, it sometimes feels like she relies a bit much on literary references, but in the end, it still feels honest. Despite my complaints I found it very well-written on the whole. Thus the the narrator's attempt to integrate his death into the story of her coming out is as much a story about how badly she wants to be connected to him, as it is about any objective explanation of his life and death. And also the summer that the Watergate scandal is exposed. As much as she tells us about her father, the narrator tells us even more about why we should be sceptical of what she's telling us.
I liked most of the artwork, but there were some confusing panels, mostly related to the letters and diary entries included in the book. Bechdel went through an obsessive-compulsive phase as a child, and her behavior included marking up her journal with symbols and writing in code. The book has recreations of those scribblings, in addition to letters in her father's cursive handwriting that are also difficult to read.
Do not expect more from a reviewer who has massive daddy issues and will continue to deal with them till the day she breathes her last. I solemnly confess to being more moved by the parts focusing on her family rather than the Künstlerroman-ish bits about her 'coming out' in college and identifying as a butch woman. This book practically pulsates with emotion, anger, and confusion, as well as the uncertainty that comes with self-discovery. When it dealt with Alison's own life or her father's struggles to find himself, the book is strongest, but it spends a lot of time holding up their story against a backdrop of classic literature , and after a while I didn't enjoy those portions as much. However, as someone who wishes his father was still alive so we could have conversations about life there never seemed to be time for then, I found Fun Home beautifully moving. I also think this book is a good introduction to the graphic novel format for some readers who have never tried one.
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