Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home came to me in a rather roundabout way. By that, I mean the first chapter of her graphic novel memoir is actually included in the essay anthology textbook my school uses. I’ve used it in class, and inevitably a student asks for more details on some of the things Bechdel reveals about her father in that one chapter, namely what was going on with the fact Bechdel states that her father had been having sex with teenage boys before he died.
Well, I knew Fun Home by its reputation as a high-quality work, so there was no reason I shouldn’t finish it.
Bechdel’s Fun Home, told in comic form, is about how she grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania with her emotionally stiffing family. The “fun home” of the title was simply her family’s shorthand for the funeral home they lived in. Her father, Bruce, was the town’s mortician, but since the town is as small as it is, he also teaches high school English to make ends meet, as does Bechdel’s mother Helen. However, Bruce has a secret that Alison doesn’t know about until her adulthood: her father is gay.
That has a lot to do with how life in the fun home works. Bechdel notes her parents are emotionally distant and barely talk to each other, both of them throwing themselves into various projects of their own. For her father, that was constantly making the house beautiful and books. For her mother, that was acting in small town productions of various plays. Bechdel herself only learns about her father’s sexual orientation when she comes out to her own parents by letter. And not long after that, her father died in a way that Bechdel can’t be sure wasn’t a suicide.
The impression I got from this memoir was that due to the distance between her parents, this has an effect on Bechdel herself. Her various neuroses and emotional problems seem deeply connected to the emotional chilliness of her home life. Her focus is largely on her father, a man who keeps doing things by himself that his daughter only retroactively notices as suspicious.
And yet, in the last chapter, during one of the last times Bechdel and her father spent with each other, there’s something like bonding there. It makes sense given her refusal in the first chapter to call him a bad father. This is a reflection, not a real-time chronicling of her life. Everything she relates is influenced by things she learned later, and Bechdel actually does a good job of parceling out information without dumping everything into the reader’s lap all at once.
A moving look at an unusual childhood, Fun Home is just a well-done book, and a perfect example of what a graphic novel can be.
Grade: A
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