Fun Home

I read through Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel in one sitting, steamrolling through it like it was my job. In fact, I had this distinct image of myself, eating a salad and reading this book at the dinner table, like a teacher burning the midnight oil to finish grading some papers. This image came to mind probably because I see Lan like that all the time, sitting Indian-style on a dining room chair with her thick glasses–she wears contacts during the day–poring over her students’ work with a massive mug of coffee standing by.

This book is probably categorized as a graphic novel, and I see it completely that way. It’s very wordy, and Bechdel’s style is spare, though there are thoughtful details that stick out: wrinkles on her parents’ faces; exact passages from books and plays; the awnings of her childhood home. She kept a journal since she was ten, and this book seems almost more like a review of that journal, fleshing the words out with remembered images and feelings.

Her use of text as an image is interesting, and though it’s a true reflection of her past, I felt it a little overused. Her journal entries, illustrated, are an example, her childish scrawls being overcome by OCD symbols and slashes being important but not so much so that every little bit had to be illustrated. Her father and she had their best correspondences through letters, and she illustrates both his profuse knowledge about the books she was reading and also some of his old love letters to her mother when he was in the army. So much illutrated text–I tended to simply skim over the and not read their handwritten messages.

I liked the photographs that she drew in, however. The style of drawing changes in these photographs, looking more realistic, as if trying to say something about the difference between truth and illusion when these pictures were taken, and are interestingly juxtaposed with her comical hand holding them.

All right, enough essay-writing. I thought that the characterizations of her mother and father were brilliant, though at the expense of the rest of her family and ultimately of the author/narrator herself. You get the sense that she’s somewhat of an aloof personality, but how much of that carries over after the funeral and into the rest of her life is unknown.

The book is less of a catharsis and more of a realization of how she was a mirror image of her father, a theme that resonates with me quite strongly.

Whether or not you are a comic lover, you can enjoy this novel. There aren’t any of those comical tropes of ‘bam!’ or ‘single bound!’, or even much digression from standard, square panels.

On the other hand, if you love action-packed stuff, then this might not be for you. Though there are a few pages that would push a movie into R-rated territory, there isn’t any violence or much foul language–systemic of a world where Bechdel grew up, not knowing the ‘seedy’ things that her father did yet knowing that there was some sort of undercurrent.