Fun Home: A family tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel, 2006

Genre: LGBTQ
Review by Joel Gould

Good grief! Has it really been 10 years since Alison Bechdel published Fun Home? I remember well the delirious critical praise the graphic memoir received. On NPR, I had listened to Bechdel describe the cocoon-like process required to translate the simultaneous awakening of her sexual identity and the revelation of her father’s into text and ink and eventually a Broadway play.  I had dug through her website and admired pictures of her cats.  As a fan of her comic, Dykes to Watch Out For, I had always intended to read Fun Home, and yet our paths never crossed paths.  Until now...

Fun Home: a family tragicomic is the gift of a polymath. With finesse, Bechdel draws and writes; laying bare the vernacular, with simple lines and grey wash, honoring the stoic, stippled and cross-hatched. Without irony or judgement, she weds the base and spiritual. She improbably joins James Joyce with Charlie Brown, or perhaps, in this case, Marcie.

I had been expecting something a little lighter: macabre, like the television series Six Feet Under, self-eviscerating like American Splendor by Harvey Pekar and retro-family-dysfunctional like Dress Your Family in Corduroy by David Sedaris. It matches those, on their own terms:  A hallowed corpse with a pile of genitals and children doing chores nearby. The unnervingly honest description of her preadolescent compulsive behavior.  Riotous, biting one liners, “I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children and his children like furniture.” (p. 13). And yet, through Bechdel’s careful modulation of character, tone, and plot, she reaches higher. This is an ambiguous meditation on the mysteries of life. How abuse, love, sickness, health, understanding and intentional-ignorance, commingle and perpetuate the cycle of beauty and death.

The book is so well executed that it makes it difficult to critically question the choices of the author. Her father is a high school English teacher and part-time funeral director.  Weeks before he steps in front of a bread delivery truck, Bechdel learns that he has had homosexual affairs, throughout his adult life, many quite likely with his students.  This realization changes her understanding of many childhood events: the high school boys that he hired for landscaping and babysitting were being groomed for relationships. The time he was arrested for buying beer for an underage boy - probably wasn’t just about malt beverages. Even the call to the cops might have been the revenge of a jealous brother, who later, in the story, apologizes with a pat on the back. Digging through an envelope labeled “family”, she comes across a blurry photograph of Roy, a former babysitter, nearly naked, reclining on a motel bed. Bechdel writes, “The blurriness of the photo gives it an ethereal, painterly quality. Roy is gilded with morning seaside light, his hair is an aureole. In fact, the picture is beautiful, but would I be assessing its aesthetic merits so calmly if it were of a seventeen year old girl?  Why am I not properly outraged? Perhaps, I identify too well with my father’s illicit awe. A trace of this seems caught in the photo, just as a trace of Roy has been caught on the light-sensitive paper.” (p. 101) As I digested the novel, questions lingered: Does Bechdel give her father an easy post-mortem pass on his likely behavior? Does she see these dynamics as the inevitable consequence of the repressive forces of the 1950s and 1960s? A time when gay men were held captive by conservative rural culture and left with a stark choice: self-deport and lose your hometown roots or stay and stifle an essential part of yourself. In this case, we can console ourselves that the creativity, literary understanding, and capacity for human expression trapped inside Bruce Allen Bechdel has come into bloom through his daughter, Alison.

Many students, combing the stacks in the library, searching for clues to their identity, like Alison herself in her first year at college, will be spellbound and relieved when they stumble upon Fun Home: A family tragicomic. Unfortunately, this book is so good that at SSU it’s popularity denies its accidental discovery. It lives behind the reserve desk!