Fun Home; A Family Tragicomic: A review

The graphic novel Fun home: A Family Tragicomic, is written and illustrated by Alison Bechdel, an “out” lesbian and graphic novelist. She is also the creator of the Dykes to Watch Out For comic series. The memoir, which was awarded Time magazine’s book of the year in 2006, tells the intimate and moving story of her growing up in a small town in Pennsylvania as one of three children born to two very educated parents, her eventual coming to terms with her sexuality and her struggle in coping with the suspected suicide of her father that eventually led to the discovery of his closeted homosexuality.
The book itself is composed and told in Bechdel’s medium as a graphic novel. The story is centered on the dynamics of her family. Alison Bechdel’s mother was graduate student at a local university with little time for a family. She is depicted as an unsatisfied woman who had greater ambitions for her life then a family and white picket fence. In contrast, the father is portrayed as a stereotypical suburbanite who spends his weekends doing odd jobs on the families Victorian house and collecting antiques. The reason for her mother’s unhappiness becomes clear when she tells Bechdel shortly after her fathers death that he had liaisons with men, mostly former student’s. She illustrates in great detail the pain her mother must have felt carrying the secret of her father’s homosexuality around. The humiliation of her father’s arrest after being caught with a student and a beer driving around town is portrayed with skill and hindsight as the author herself was too young to have known much of the reason behind what had happened on that night.
She describes her house as an artist commune of sorts. There was very little communication between family members. The author describes her family as being a talented group. Everyone was typically off working on a particular project. Her mother was often busy working on her thesis, her father spent most of his time in his library reading and the children were often encouraged to express themselves in one form or another whether they wanted to or not.
The story appears to begin in the late 1950’s, early 1960’s and takes the reader along on a journey of not only the life of the author but runs parallel to and highlights the development of the gay rights movement including the impact the Stonewall Inn riots had on her life. The author correlates her self- discovery along side the early gay rights movement. As she reminisces over her walk through the village with her family and passing the stonewall inn shortly after the riots occurred, she says there was still “a feeling of electricity in the air”. The illustration depicts the Stonewall Inn with the Mattachine Society’s message in the window.
There is a heavy focus in the book on the tense relationship between her and her father. The novel portrays with humor the painful struggles of the author’s childhood, growing up with an overbearing father, who as the author describes, ran the family and their renovated Victorian house as if it were a museum. Her father was a former military man when he met his wife while overseas. He later became a high school literature teacher with a love for post-modern literature though he showed obvious dilike for his job. Bechdel reminisces over the discussions between her and her father regarding books as being the foundation of their relationship and until her fathers death she seemed to feel it was all they had in common. Bechdel illustrates this point by telling the story through a literary perspective using books that were in her dad’s library. This aspect of the memoire was very enlightening and amusing to those who have read any Earnest Hemingway or other post modern works. Alison Bechdel gives her story added depth by almost assigning her and her father, the two main characters, a literary persona of sorts based on her dad’s favorite pieces of fiction. This fictional persona fluctuates as the story develops to provide insight into the emotion surrounding the two main characters at a specific time.
As the author goes away to college in New York, her life begins to change. She meets her first girlfriend, discovers the underground world of gay liberation that’s taking place including lesbian and feminist literature. She comes out to her family through a postal letter and receives a surprisingly accepting but coded message from her father in return. Her interest in her studies begins to wane as she became more involved in her newly founded gay identity. She explores the “gay scene” in New York and becomes more interested in studying this aspect of herself then she was in studying literature. This eventually catches up with her as she starts to struggle with a class on James Joyces’s Ulysses, her senior seminar class that she had taken to please her dad.
Bechdel’s skilled and humorous bringing together of oral and social history in this book provides an intimate look at the struggle one goes through in the process of coming to terms with and coming out as a lesbian through the authors experiences and struggles as she did it. Bechdel’s illustrations provide the reader with a deeper sense of what she conveys with her words.
Alison Bechdel very nicely illustrates the story with explicit emotions and illustrations of what the world of her small town home looked like through her eyes. An example of this would be after the death of her grandfather when her dad takes over the family owned mortuary business. She recalls the time she walked in on her father in the process of an embalming and seeing her first body and how aloof her father was about it. She looks back fondly on the time spent as a kid helping polish the newly delivered coffins with her siblings, the time spent playing hide and go seek in the coffin display room. To many this would be seen as morbid at best, but to the author this was a normal part of her day to day life. This book would be a good read to anyone who is curious to the experiences of coming out to family and one’s self. The work also provides a humorous look at certain events in history that had an impact on gay histo