(ed. note: Subbing in for Wil today is a friend and reader, Serra Sewitch. We should have things back on track next week. Enjoy! -dalton)

Fun Home
Alison Bechdel

Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel, is very different from any graphic novel I’ve seen. That’s probably why it won crazy amounts of awards and was voted Best Book of the Year by scads of periodicals including Time, Entertainment Weekly, New York Times, People, SF Chronicle, Village Voice, etc etc.

It’s a memoir. It’s a “tragicomic”. It’s a lesson in literature. It’s a coming out story. It’s a girl struggling with getting to know her distant father. I don’t know if Alison Bechdel herself coined the term “tragicomic” but it definitely fits this book. The illustrations are realistic yet cartoony, and the subject matter is both heart wrenching and chuckle-inducing. I heard that it took her seven years to complete because she drew each frame from photos that she took of herself posing as different characters.

She weaves all kinds of crazy connections and layers- the most obvious one being that her parents are both English teachers and she constantly compares them and their family situation to characters in and authors of various novels, from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Albert Camus, to Daedalus and Icarus in Greek myths. She often speculates about her father’s thoughts and motives based on the notes he scribbled in margins of books and which phrases he happened to underline. Her father’s obsession with antiques and architectural renovation becomes a metaphor for the intricate deceptions he creates to mask his secret of being a closet homosexual; which links to the author’s own sexuality and discovery of self. There is a funny full page illustration of her young self beside her father in front of a mirror getting dressed up for a wedding: the author in “the least girly dress in the store” wishing she could wear pants and sneakers, and the father next to her in a flamboyant velvet suit, saying how he wished they had some kind of straw bonnet she could wear. Her and her father are reversals of each other, which at times brings them closer together. Her father also works as an embalmer at a funeral home (which they call the “fun home”) which brings up various issues of death and decay, an ironic foreshadowing of her father’s own early death (which Bechdel speculates was a suicide) by a Sunbeam bread truck when she is twenty years old. (Don’t worry, she brings this up in the first chapter so I didn’t give away the ending or anything.)

There is so much detail in this story that it’s easy to lose yourself in her world and feel the strange secretive aloofness in her family growing up. It brought up memories for me about what it’s like to be a kid trying to figure things out and sometimes not being able to understand the complex things your parents are going through. This story is about her looking back and trying to make sense of things from an adult perspective.

Pretty amazing.