Fun Home – A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel is an evocative graphic memoir based on the author’s life and family. The novel consists of a charming blend of images and text, where the narrative serves as a running commentary on the illustrations. The style is compelling in its balance of mediums - by allowing the words to introduce and punctuate the images, the author has enabled the book to become an illustrated diary of sorts, documenting events and emotions. The artwork in itself is stunning – Bechdel’s choice of a limited color palette gives the images a somber appearance which is in keeping with the story’s somewhat melancholy content. The details in the sketching is what draws one in the most in Fun Home – whether it be in the depiction of the gothic revival house she grew up in, or the journals that she kept for years – Bechdel has gone to great pains to portray her memories as accurately as possible.
The story revolves around Bechdel’s tumultous relationship with her father, who was hit by a truck and killed at the age of 44. The author’s earliest impressions of him constitute a man who is stern and emotionally-unresponsive to his children - one entirely too concerned with constructing an ideal image. In calling him an “old artificer“, Bechdel demonstrates how her father’s public persona contradicted his personal one, and how masterful he was in embelleshing and obscuring the facts. ” He used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not.” (p. 16) She is also suspicious of the cause of his death and says there is a chance it might have been suicide, believing her father’s dismay in those last days of his life might have pushed him over the edge. “His death was quite possibly his consummate artifice, his masterstroke.” (p. 27)
The plot essentially is fixated on one particular incident, to be resumed and reassessed time and again as the book progresses. This specific moment was when the protagonist decides to reveal to her parents that she is in fact a lesbian and found out, through her mother, that her father was a homosexual as well, and this had such a significant impact on the author’s psyche that it has been chosen to be the point where all her narrative ventures begin and end. By going back and forth in time, Bechdel shows us the consequences of that revelation on the relationship between the father and daughter, and the various clues in her childhood that would no doubt have been indications of this situation.
Bechdel’s timing is impeccable; the story runs at a comfortable pace, delivered piece by piece via an engaging and poetic narrative. The book is ultimately forgiving; towards the end; one can see that Bechdel has, to a certain extent, purged her father of his misdeeds, choosing instead to take a more benign approach in remembering him and the various unexpected ways in which their two lives and stories had come to coincide over time. In doing so, Bechdel is able to reveal the bond between them in all its inescapable and enigmatic glory.
“What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were dad’s thought about my thoughts about him, and his thoughts about my thoughts about his thoughts about me?” (p. 212)
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