She recalls her father, enraged at her refusing to wear a dress and disappearing into the Manhattan night, supposedly cruising for young men.

Both guilty for her implication in his death and childishly eager for confirmation of her part and significance in it. Bechdel burrows into her father as a character, trying to see him clearly, to figure him out, fighting against the urge we all struggle with in our lives – the urge to see our parents as infallible, or even simply as strong the urge to cover our eyes and plug our ears at any manifestation of imperfection, at any instance in which our parents appear as human, or, dare I say, interesting.īechdel leads readers through her life, from tomboy to sexually-confused adolescent, to emerging lesbian and successful carton artist, all the while lumbering under the weight of the paradox: both abhorring her father and hoping to become his happier, more liberated reincarnation. This, after all, seems like the perfect genre for me, because if there’s anything I like more than books, it’s films, and if there’s anything I like more than films, it’s books.įun Home is a graphic memoir, in which author Alison Bechdel recounts her childhood in a funeral home and tries to make sense of her father’s latent homosexual tendencies and of his death under unclear circumstances (interpreted by her as a possible suicide). I’d only recently discovered the world of graphic novels, a late revelation that made me sorry for all that wasted time. How do you define the experience of reading a book that makes you feel simultaneously elated and devastated? How do you recommend a graphic novel that contains about six squares of drawing and fifty words of text per page, and yet can take about a week to read, every sparse square containing multitudes, working on three different levels of content-image, dialogue, narration-that are both hidden and revealing, analytical and bashful, courageous and terrified?

I’d read it last October-quite late to the game, I know-and was touched to my core. It was surprisingly hard to rate Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel, on Goodreads.

Alison bechdel fun home musical