“Fun Home”
by Alison Bechdel
Houghton Mifflin, 2006

“Fun Home,” Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel/memoir of growing up, coping with her father’s suicide and her realization she’s a lesbian, is subtitled “a family tragicomic.”

Whether the “comic” she’s referring to is the medium of the book or the sometimes painfully funny revelations she recounts is unclear, but “Fun Home” is definitely heavy on the tragedy side of things. But Bechdel, an award-winning cartoonist best known for her “Dykes to Watch Out For” series, makes her familial misery easy to read and impossible to turn away from, even when things are at their most awkward.

And there are plenty of awkward moments in “Fun Home.” Bechdel painstakingly chronicles her adolescent years, growing up in a small Pennsylvania town with a closeted homosexual father and an artistically frustrated mother. Just after Bechdel was born, her father, Bruce, was called home from a stint in the Army to take over the family business: a funeral home. Growing up, Bechdel and her brothers divided their time between the “fun home,” as the family called it, and the old Victorian house that their father was obsessively attempting to restore. Once out of the house and in college, Bechdel discovered she is a lesbian—just as her father died under mysterious circumstances. After his death, Bechdel learned of her father’s hidden life, and the various family mysteries she couldn’t understand while growing up became much clearer.

It’s tempting to compare “Fun Home” to the work of David Sedaris and other contemporary memoirists who mine their dysfunctional families for material. But Bechdel isn’t really playing her childhood for laughs. There’s plenty of raw, heartfelt emotion throughout the book, and she guides the reader through the emotional twists and turns of her family life with an ease that’s sometimes shocking. Within the first six panels of the book, Bechdel draws out the two sides of her father—begrudgingly affectionate family man and a person obsessed with maintaining outward appearances, no matter the cost. Of course, that portrait becomes richer and more complex over the course of the rest of the book, but everything you need to know about her father, from his facial expressions to the way he walks and talks, is right there in those six drawings. Bechdel’s art is simple but expressive. Like her father, she’s obsessed with details, and she fills her narrative with maps, text pieces, wallpaper patterns and other minutia. A splash page focusing on a picture Bechdel discovered of Roy, her father’s “gardening partner” and sometime family babysitter, is breathtakingly detailed.

Bechdel isn’t any slouch as a writer, either. She has a clear, clean prose style and drops allusions to “Ulysses” and “Swan’s Way” the way other memoirists talk about their favorite childhood toys. At times, it gets to be a little much and Bechdel veers dangerously close to pretension, but the raw emotion saves the narrative. And though there’s plenty of sadness and sorrow throughout “Fun Home,” Bechdel never asks for the reader’s pity, nor does she feel sorry for herself. That frank matter-of-factness at first feels surprising and strange, but by the end feels strong and confident.

“Fun Home” is a solid, heartfelt piece of work that, if there’s any justice, will take its place in the comics cannon alongside “Persepolis,” “American Splendor” and the biographical work of Will Eisner. Don’t be surprised if, in 30 or 40 years, cartoonists/memoirists aren’t dropping their own allusions to “Fun Home.”