Brilliant. Groundbreaking. Glorious!

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	• Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic Alison Bechdel Mariner Books, 2007 - 232 pages average customer review:based on 90 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Brilliant. Groundbreaking. Glorious!

I cannot praise this graphic novel enough. I was so impressed with way Bechdel wove her memoir together, building from one memory into the next. At first I found some of her writing potentially pretentious, something I have seen in the writings of other memoirs where the author wants the reader to know how much they know, to be impressed with the use of precise vocubulary, and the manipulation of time to unfold a story. Usually, these don't work because they are not used effectively so much as for effect. Bechdel, however, has no pretense. Vulnerable and transparent, how she tells her personal story is so powerful it breaks your heart and inspires you soul all at the same time. Her use of the same image, with a slightly different perspective, is not merely clever but perfection. If I could beg her to write about her relationship with her mother, I would. But what would be the point? Then I would want to know more about her relationships with her siblings, with her lovers, with her neighbors. I could never have enough. It is enough to hope for more.

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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

An absolutely brilliant, hard to put down and very moving story. I go back to it often and think about it always. Beautiful, witty, hilarious.

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The complexities of identity

I live an hour away from Beech Creek, Alison Bechdel's tiny hometown and the setting for much of her graphic memoir Fun Home. I've always found the area oppressive: dark, looming mountains casting perpetual shadows on impoverished, dying valley towns. But after reading Fun Home, I revisited Beech Creek, to see Bechdel's childhood home and the grave of her father Bruce, and to remind myself of how cruelly ironic life can be.

Bruce Bechdel, a man who loves literature (in his early days he identified with F. Scott Fitzgerald; in his final days he reads Proust), an aesthete with a taste for the baroque detail of the Victorian era, and a creative and versatile designer of interior and exterior landscapes, is born and lives in rural central Pennsylvania, running the family funeral home and teaching at the local high school. He never quite fits in. Always sun-tanned and exquisitely dressed (no plaid hunter's shirts or chewing tobacco for him), persnickety and a bit prissy, but at the same time speaking with a back-country twang, Bruce seems uncannily out of place in Beech Creek.

And he's a closeted gay man, who has occasional affairs on the side and otherwise sublimates his repressed sexuality by obsessively restoring the Victorian-era house in which Alison grew up. The tension of his closeted life makes him aloof, prone to violent temper tantrums, controlling, and sometimes cruel to both wife and children.

Alison's Bechdel's memoir of him, and the way in which her own identity both became the inverse of his and yet in many respects parallels his, is a sophisticated narrative that underscores just how complex personal identity is. Alison is who she is, just as her father was who he was, because of the convergence of Beech Creek, sexuality, alienation, fun, repression, the need to be creative, the yearning for affection, the factuality of history and the re-creation of memory. There's no formulaic happy ending here, no artificial structuring to make more sense of the relationship between herself and her father than there really was. Instead, what the reader is offered is a profound, sensitive, bittersweet effort to explore memory in search of identity--an effort which throughout is punctuated by Bechdel's references to both Proust and James Joyce--and an appreciation for the ironies of fate which make us who we become.

Other reviewers have mentioned that they read the memoir at one setting. I found it so intense that I could only take it in small portions, and even then I sometimes felt overwhelmed. For in sharing her own identity-forming memories with us, she invites us to plumb more deeply into our own. And both exercises, although potentially liberating, can also be harrowing.

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Funny and genuine

Perhaps it is inevitable that I'd fall for this book, given that I'm a fan of comics --Art Speigelman, Chris Ware, Lynda Barry, Megan Kelso, Gilbert & Jamie Hernandez... and of course Alison Bechdel, whose Dykes to Watch Out For strip I've followed for a long time. Compared to that strip, this book has a more gentle pace and wry wit. It says as much as written biographies in a surprisingly compact way. The ending disappointed some, but surely real life is harder than fiction to tie up in a tidy bow.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

In this groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father. In her hands, personal history becomes a work of amazing subtlety and power, written with controlled force and enlivened with humor, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail.

Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the "Fun Home." It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.

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