Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir charts her fraught relationship with her late father.
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. In her hands, personal history becomes a work of amazing subtlety and power, written with controlled force and enlivened with humour, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail.
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
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It’s a beautifully written book with chapters that are thematic rather than chronological, and each chapter is connected to a book that her father adored. Consequently, it isn’t a book about what happened to her father, a secretly gay man who committed suicide a few months after Alison, then 19 years old, came out. It involves searching through a family archive to attempt to understand her father’s uniqueness.
She immediately reveals the plot in the opening. On a Pennsylvania highway, he leaps in front of a truck, and the rest of the book is an immensely affecting, potent examination of her own upbringing. An adult’s exploration of a family archive containing records, pictures, mementoes, and other items.
Alison Bechel, who loves memoirs and illustrations, had a difficult upbringing. The third generation in the funeral industry, including her father. While having to prepare the viewing area with the folding chairs and always acting eerily is a wonderful part of childhood, it is disturbing enough to be around funeral decor and have to be quite sombre in public. Alison’s mother wasn’t one to give warm hugs; she was eccentric and a perfectionist. He had affairs with the men he employed, and I’ll never forgive him for asking for assistance with a client’s embalming. Not much of a help, but having to share a space with a naked corpse is not pleasant for any child.
