Fun Home
2000
- cartoonists
- graphic novels
- comic books, strips
- closeted gays
- homosexuality
- lesbians
- family relationships
- lesbian cartoonists
- biography
- novela gráfica
The story
A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.
What it’s like
Fun Home has a restrained, precise look built from ink line work and muted watercolor washes, with a palette of dusty ochres, funereal greys and faded greens that suits its Victorian house and mortuary settings. Panels are tightly gridded and often symmetrical, with recurring framings of rooms, staircases and dim interiors that feel like still lifes, while passages of family photographs and sketched book pages give the reading a scrapbook texture. The mood is gothic and wry at once, a cool melancholy with flashes of dark humor, the kind of book to read slowly on a rainy afternoon or late at night with a lamp on. Its pacing is deliberate and layered, circling back through childhood, adolescence and the author's college years, and its emotional core is a daughter's ambivalent longing for a distant, secretive father, with a late turn toward self-acceptance. Content is frank rather than lurid: sexual subject matter, adult affairs and a sudden death are depicted directly, with some explicit drawings of intimacy, though violence is minimal and the register stays observational. It suits adult readers who enjoy literary memoir, queer family stories, and the formal play of graphic narrative.
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