Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

While stranded in Philly in May (not a bad place to be stranded, fyi, because I got to stay in Bruder's lovely and miniature Rittenhouse Square apartment), Anne strongly suggested that I pick up a graphic novel that she had just taught in her women's memoir course at Bryn Mawr. This suggestion was met with an automatic "No."

A) I don't "do" graphic novels.
B) Enough said.

I thought this would be the end of the conversation for sure. Instead, we found ourselves idly searching for it in her neighborhood bookstore, and after reading one page I could not put it down. Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel, is the illustrated story of Bechdel's fraught relationship with her father, a high school English teacher and closeted homosexual who spends most of his waking hours obsessing about the decor of his rambling Gothic Revival home. As Bechdel describes him:

"My father could spin garbage...into gold. He could transfigure a room with the smallest offhand flourish. He could conjure an entire, finished period interior from a paint chip. He was an alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a Daedalus of decor..."

What you are missing from this description though are the wonderful illustrations and asides that make a graphic novel so rich and layered. And witty! The other tennis coach grabbed it out of my bag on a long bus ride to Memphis, and she was giggling the whole way. Every now and then she would shout, "Hey Lemon! What does solipsistic mean? What does simulacrum mean?" Bechdel's vocabulary absolutely rocks this book. After all, there are only so many words which one can fit in the margins or bubbles of an illustrated page, and so Bechdel has chosen them with razor sharp precision.

Important to note that this is also the story of Bechdel's own coming to terms with her sexual orientation. It is her "Odyssey," (and yes, literary references do crop up on every other page), yet she sees it as tangential to her understanding of her father. From the opening page she describes their relationship in terms of Icarus and Daedalus and questions who is actually father to whom: "In our particular reenactment of this mythic relationship, it was not me but my father who was to plummet from the sky..."

Poignant, humorous, and heartbreaking - sometimes all of these on the same page - it is one of my favorite reads this year. To end on a tantalizing note, it is also quite "graphic." Might want to read this one away from the kids' end of the pool this summer...