Alison Bechdel
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006)
Author: Alison Bechdel
Genre: Graphic Novel (Memoir)
Plot Summary:
While she was growing up, Alison Bechdel's parents were emotionally distant. Her mother Helen was an actress and spent much of her time rehearsing, working on her thesis, or playing the piano. Her father Bruce was a high school English teacher and the third-generation director of the Bechdel Funeral Home (which the family nicknamed the "fun home"). He put all of his energy into restoring their Victorian house. When Alison went away to college, she made the realization that she was a lesbian. She wrote home to tell her parents only to have her mother call to inform her that Bruce had for many years been having extramarital relationships with men, including his high school students. Soon after Alison came out to her parents, her mother asked her father for a divorce. Two weeks later, Bruce was hit by a truck and killed. While it looked like an accident, Alison always suspected that it was suicide. SPOILER: Fun Home does not rely on a straight-line plot. Instead, it consists of remembrances from Alison's childhood and young adult years, which she pieces together to try to make sense of her father's closeted life and of her own strange relationship with him. In light of the realization that her father was gay, she reflects on important incidents from her childhood, the character of both of her parents, and on the bond she and her father shared through literature. In the end, she does not find any definitive answers to her questions about her father, but she does conclude that he even though he died, he and she continue to share a complex bond.
Geographical Setting: Mainly set in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, with a few scenes in New York City and Germany
Time Period: 1960s-1980s
Appeal Characteristics:
One of the most important appeal elements in Fun Home is characterization. The relationship between Alison and her father is the main theme of the book and thus Alison analyzes both her own and her father's character in detail. Bechdel goes to great lengths to describe and depict the essence of her father, including his reading habits, his style of clothing, and a map of the major events in his life. Bechdel also gives the reader incredible insight into her own character as a child and adolescent, even allowing the reader into her diary. Another important appeal element is writing style. Bechdel's text ties with her pictures in creative, sometimes extraordinary ways. Her father was an English teacher and the influence of literature on Alison's life is clearly present in her writing. Bechdel relies heavily on literary allusions and metaphors to present the story of her family. Readers who love words will marvel at Bechdel's amazing vocabulary and her graceful, honest, and carefully-crafted method of story-telling. Bechdel's style of illustration is cartoonish, black and white, and not overly dense on the page. Even her cartoon drawings are detailed. She has a talent for conveying feeling through facial expression and for conveying a strong sense of place through her illustrations. The storyline is complex, taking place on multiple levels. Bechdel tells her story through letters, journal entries, pictures, maps, and literary allusions. She jumps between time periods and places, allowing the reader to piece the whole picture together. While there are a few major events, the story is mostly focused on people and psychological issues affecting them. The result is an unresolved conclusion that is thought-provoking. The majority of the story takes place in the small town of Beech Creek, PA. This frame affects the tone, creating the stifling feeling of an insular community--a place that is not open to homosexuality. For effect, Bechdel includes a map showing close proximity of her extended family and another map showing the major events in her father's life, which took place within a circle with a mile and a half diameter. As the title suggests, the tone is "tragicomic." Bechdel employs dark humor in her description of the absurdities of her family life. The pace is measured and dense. Bechdel describes the main climactic event, her father's death, in chapter two but revisits the event many times. The book is a slow, fine-tuned analysis of her family's life, returning repeatedly to important events, playing on different themes, and carefully extracting meaning.
Read-alikes:
Readers who enjoyed Fun Home might also want to check out Bechdel’s other works, which share a similar art style and richly developed characters. Her comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, is available in ten collected volumes (the first is titled Dykes to Watch Out For) and The Indelible Alison Bechdel: Confessions, Comix, and Miscellaneous Dykes to Watch Out for is a prose and comic hybrid. Readers who enjoyed this graphic memoir with its sometimes tragic, sometimes humorous tone might also enjoy Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi. Satrapi employs a similar deceptively simple, cartoonish style to illustrate her story of growing up in Iran amidst great political upheaval. Those who enjoy story lines dealing with the psychological aspects of troubled family life might enjoy Epileptic by David B. Epileptic is the author's graphic novel memoir of growing up in the 1960s with an epileptic brother and parents who relied on alternative medicine to try to cure him. While David B.'s surreal illustrations differ from Bechdel's more realistic ones, he has a similarly artful writing style which Bechdel fans will appreciate. Another graphic novel with a story line focusing on the psychological aspects of troubled family life is Blankets by Craig Thompson. Those who were drawn to Bechdel's honest writing style and the stifling atmosphere she conveyed through her small-town setting may also find Thompson's work appealing. Blankets is Thompson's autobiographical work about growing up as an artist with strict fundamentalist Christian parents. Readers who are willing to make a departure from memoirs may enjoy Ghost World by Daniel Clowes. It is a graphic novel about Enid and Rebecca, two friends who are beginning to drift apart after graduating from high school. Those who enjoyed Bechdel's exploration of the relationship between herself and her father may also enjoy Clowes' exploration of the relationship between Enid and Rebecca. Both books feature detailed characterization of their two main characters. Ghost World has a melancholy tone, similar to some of the more tragic moments in Fun Home. Readers who are looking for another memoir with a detailed characterization of a father-daughter relationship, but who are willing to depart from the graphic novel format, may enjoy Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods--My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine by Noelle Howey. Howey tells her story of growing up with a transgendered father. Much like Bechdel, Howey tells her story honestly, with a humorous tone. A non-graphic novel memoir that might also be of interest is Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club. Though dark in tone, it is character-driven and has a literary writing style that could appeal to Bechdel’s fans. Those readers attracted to the brisk pace and character-driven storyline of Fun Home might try R. Crumb’s autobiography, The R. Crumb Handbook (Crumb co-authored the book with Peter Poplaski), which is composed of comics and photographs. However, this title contains some misogynistic and explicit content, which will not appeal to everyone.
Red Flags: The main theme of the book is coming to terms with homosexuality. Contains graphic nudity, some sex scenes, strong language. Heavy reliance on literary allusion.
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