Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

published	2006 by Houghton Mifflin
binding	Hardcover
isbn	0618477942 (isbn13: 9780618477944)
ebook
pages	240
literary awards	2006 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
description	This breakout book by Alison Bechdel takes its place alongside the unnerving, memorable, darkly funny family memoirs of Augusten Burroughs and Mary Ka...more [close] This breakout book by Alison Bechdel takes its place alongside the unnerving, memorable, darkly funny family memoirs of Augusten Burroughs and Mary Karr. It's a father-daughter tale pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings and like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolisa story exhilaratingly suited to the graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian house, 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 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 adolescence, the denouement is swift . . . graphic . . . and redemptive. [close]
date added	01-19-07 edit book

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Sara rated it:

04/27/08

Read in April, 2008

recommends it for: Folks stuck in LAX

I went out and bought this book immediately after hearing a paper on it at a recent conference. The paper had to do with narrative strategies that children use for uncovering and witnessing their parents' trauma -- in this book, the narrator Allison tries to piece together her father's life into a narrative she wants to read as that of a closeted gay man. In the narrator's logic, her coming out of the closet prompted her father's suicide four months later. After a life of secret affairs and sedu...more I went out and bought this book immediately after hearing a paper on it at a recent conference. The paper had to do with narrative strategies that children use for uncovering and witnessing their parents' trauma -- in this book, the narrator Allison tries to piece together her father's life into a narrative she wants to read as that of a closeted gay man. In the narrator's logic, her coming out of the closet prompted her father's suicide four months later. After a life of secret affairs and seduction of teenage boys, her father -- according to her narrative -- couldn't face having missed out on -- or chasing after -- the freedom that was now available to her as a post-Stonewall gay woman.

But it's not clear how much credit we are to give to this narration, and how much the point of the narrative is to expose its own tenuousness. Her father's death was ruled an accident -- he stumbled into oncoming traffic while clearing a lot. Even if the death was willed, the narrator herself provides plenty of evidence for other constructions of what could have caused the suicide. A man whose rage for order verged on Mommy Dearest, the father clearly suffered from a mood disorder, narcissism, and even a tendency to kleptomania -- none of which are endemic to homosexuality, even of the closeted sort. The man was unpleasant, clearly disturbed and distraught by his wife's recent request for a divorce.

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. Every episode she recounts is layered to the point of being overburdened with symbolism -- the summer her father gets into trouble with the law for seducing a teenage boy is also the summer her mother has the lead in an Oscar Wilde play -- and also the summer Allison gets her period. And also the summer that the Watergate scandal is exposed. This surplus of symbolic baggage is further compromised by the narrator's accounts her own childhood attempts to keep a diary -- which she marked up with the annotations "I think" "I think" "I think" to ward off the dangers of claiming as objective what was only her point of view. 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.

And maybe what's most fascinating about her attempts to identify her homosexuality to her father's sexual life is all of the possible identifications she has to shut down to get there. Identifying with her father means she doesn't have to identify with the teenage boys he exploited, placing his desires before their autonomy. Naming her coming out of the closet as the catalyst for her father's death removes blame from her mother, whose request for divorce might otherwise provide a suicide motive. At the same time it erases the possibility that coming out of the closet prompted her mother to ask for the divorce, moved to escape a sham marriage by her own daughter's unwillingness to play along with convention. The narrator's musings that if her father had chosen in the early 80s not suicide but life as a gay man, he probably would have ended up dead of AIDS anyway acts a safety valve, a way of keeping her identification with her father from becoming too all-consuming. The father who controlled the decor of her bedroom, the clothes she wore, the books she read could just as easily have moved in and decided to inhabit and use even her homosexuality as an extension of himself if he hadn't died first. Her dependence in the last few chapters of the novel on Proust, Joyce and Collette to explain her relationship with her father seem a distancing move, so that she might understand her identification with her father as an identification with any character in a book -- intense, but not impinging in one's daily life.

The potential destruction the father could have worked on the daughter by living might be read in the baroque level of detail this graphic novel has, despite being authored and illustrated by a self-professed modern minimalist. Instead of spare lines and empty spaces Allison Bechdel fills her book with the gingerbread latticing, velvet flocked wall-paper and intricately carved bannisters of her father's pretentious Victorian tastes. ...less

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2 comments

Kurtis rated it:

12/20/07

bookshelves: graphic-novels

The first page of Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel shows its young heroine, Alison, playing "airplane" with her father. Anna Karenina is shown, set carefully aside by her dad while he plays the game, recalling the first sentence of that novel: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. This lovely panel sets up the two themes of the book — the extraordinary story behind the Bechdel’s own peculiar brand of unhappiness, and a series of literar...more The first page of Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel shows its young heroine, Alison, playing "airplane" with her father. Anna Karenina is shown, set carefully aside by her dad while he plays the game, recalling the first sentence of that novel: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. This lovely panel sets up the two themes of the book — the extraordinary story behind the Bechdel’s own peculiar brand of unhappiness, and a series of literary allusions that inform not just the text of this particular book, but the lives of its characters.

Bechdel’s father is obsessed with F. Scott Fitzgerald; her mother perceives herself as a Henry James heroine. They meet during a college production of Taming of the Shrew, a disastrously appropriate model for their marraige. The literary affectations of her father are so intertwined with his life, it becomes one narrative: he obsessively renovates and decorates their Victorian home (on a high-school teacher’s salary, no less), treating his children like servants in his labors–aspiring to be the aristocrat of classic novels, or at least the tragic aspirant to aristocracy of his favorite novel, The Great Gatsby. (Alison Bechdel’s own influences are satirically backgrounded in another telling panel, where her father’s perusal of a Fitzgerald biography is in stark contrast to the horror comic his army pal is reading.)

Later, Alison contextualizes both her father’s private homosexuality and her own public homosexuality with Proust’s memoirs. She shows herself in bed with her lover, reading everything from the dictionary to Winnie the Pooh. The relationship between her lover, Joan, and her mother is encapsulated in a scene where the latter allows the former to take any book from the late father’s library, and is visibly distressed when Joan takes a volume of Wallace Stevens, whose domestic misery is similar to her own. Maps of her home town are juxtaposed with maps from The Wind in the Willows; and family drama is frequently layered with various family members reading from plays. On and on it goes; there’s nary a scene without a literary reference point.

Bechdel also interrogates her own writing, recalling her early diaries, and a process of turning words into graphical gestures, and later illustrating her entries, that I found incredibly interesting. She also blurs her life and the idea of text, suggesting (in one humorous example) that the clashing of private events and public events are a "heavy handed plot device," and describes other real events as if they symbolic literary devices.

Among all of these texts is a painful coming of age story, with a distant mother and a manic-depressive father with a secret life. It’s a poignant, occasionally humorous autobiography, well written and brilliantly (and blatantly) drawn. In (yet another allusive) scene, the girl Alison asks her father for money to buy Mad books. I suddenly saw in Bechdel’s drawings, the influence of artists like the brilliant Sergio Aragones, who packs his illustrations with little jokes and subplots. In fact, in another scene, Bedchel shows her college-aged self sketching Aragones-like marginalia in her copy of Ulysses. It’s a perfect summary of this impressive novel: a Joycean epic rife with literary allusions and the whismical doodling of a Mad magazine artist.

Though rife with allusions, the narrative of Fun Home is honest and unpretentious, a matter-of-fact unraveling and probing at identity and family history comporable to Art Spiegleman’s Maus and Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese. There seems to be something incredibly appropriate about the medium of graphic novels for this kind of work, or perhaps I’ve just happened across three authors that do it incredibly well.
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