This moving graphic memoir revolves around two homes. The first is the house where Alison Bechdel grew up: a Gothic revival that her father had painstakingly rescued from decreptitude, restoring it to “its original condition and then some.” While her friends admired the place, to Alison and her family it was a museum.
Then there was “Fun Home,” the funeral parlor where Bechdel’s father moonlighted as an undertaker, and where she and her brother played among the accoutrements of death.
Both of these homes were designed to cover something up, and “Fun Home” is Bechdel’s attempt to discover how these two acts of concealment were related. Bechdel is widely known for her syndicated comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For.” This is her first outing with a mainstream publisher, and it’s clear she is ready for an even wider audience.
Narrated in panels like a comic book, and illustrated with a casual artistry, it is a quietly devastating story for the way it returns readers to a child’s point of view. It blurts out terrible facts – like Bechdel’s father’s early, untimely death, his illicit, extramarital affairs with men – and then moves on before the reader has had a chance to absorb them.
Amid all this lurid detail, “Fun Home” is also a sweet but complicated story about a woman trying to understand where she comes from. Bechdel’s father was an avid gardener, an aesthete, a cologne-wearing sissy, as she describes him, who would get furious if a barrette had fallen out of her hair. As if in compensation for his feminine interests, Bechdel took to French cuffs and manly haircuts.
Books were an important part of Bechdel’s growing up and coming out as a lesbian. An English teacher who had spent time in Paris, Bechdel’s father had read the work of James Joyce closely, so closely he often quoted lines from “Ulysses” without knowing it. When it came to giving his daughter a book, it was the memoirs of Colette, one of the most libertine lesbian writers to ever live. And this before she announced she was gay. Was it a message, she wonders?
For all its mock-earnest Freudian self-analysis, “Fun Home” vibrates with a tangible sense of loss.
Parsing a mixed bag of memories, Bechdel wants to know whether a tableau based on lies can contain anything worth salvaging. The saddest and truest thing about this tremendous book is after all her searching, Bechdel admits there really is no answer to that question.
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
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Fun Home
A Family Tragicomic
By Alison Bechdel
Houghton Mifflin, 232 pages, $19.95
