Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Under the Microscope

By JoAnne Ruvoli
August 1, 2006

A comic book like Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic comes around very rarely. Comparisons to the long form graphic memoirs by Art Spiegelman and Marjane Satrapi are inevitable, as are comparisons to the graphic fictions of Craig Thompson, Lynda Barry, Jessica Abel and Howard Cruse. Like these other texts, Fun Home stretches and elevates the form of graphic storytelling and has already captured the attention of the wider reading audience. The complexity of a few of its juxtapositions are worth noting immediately: a compelling coming-of-age tale is combined with an emotionally entangled family mystery; the rich literary palette blends naturally with the details of '70s pop culture; social history coincides with personal experience; visually, varied textual styles balance photographic and illustrative images. Like many classic works of literature, Fun Home uses these juxtaposed tensions in an exploration of memory.

The narrative reveals immediately that Bruce Bechdel, Alison's father, was hit by a truck and died when Alison was nineteen, but that the circumstances may indicate it was more of a suicide than an accident. Her mother had just asked for a divorce and Alison herself had just come out to her family as a lesbian. Both events may have triggered a crisis for Bruce, and the narrative sets out to examine the evidence, causes, and consequences—to make meaning of the memories.

Bechdel's weekly Dykes To Watch Out For has been running in newspapers and annual compilations since the mid-80s, and parts of Fun Home revisit miscellaneous pieces compiled in The Indelible Alison Bechdel, which won a 1999 Lambda Literary Award. She has several other Lambda awards and Eisner nominations. With the mainstream critical attention that Fun Home has already garnered—reviews in the national media like the New York Times and Entertainment Weekly — I expect more accolades are on their way.

I've always enjoyed Bechdel's artwork, but Fun Home's images have a detailed and illustrative painterly quality that distinguishes her from other sequential artists. Without the constraints of the DTWOF strip format, Bechdel's skills are on full display. The variety of sizes her frames take move naturally from long shots to close-ups, through shadows and spotlights, to enhance the story. The rich textures of the lines are subtly shaded with a warm gray wash that softens the lines and adds depth to the scenes. In a July appearance at Chicago's Women and Children First Bookstore and in interviews, she has described her drawing process as one of multiple layers constructed from vintage photos as well as posed re-enactments of remembered scenes. Despite going from sketches to a computer drawing program several times for lines, washes and texts, the artwork remains energetic and fresh. A lingering review of the art alone is immensely satisfying, since upon first reading the book, I raced through the pages to find out how the story would unfold. Closer examination reveals documentary quality details of '60s and '70s pop culture embedded quietly in the backgrounds, clothing, and objects: wood-paneled station wagons, high-necked T-shirts, striped or cut-off shorts, Keds, Quisp cereal, and HR Puffenstuff lunchboxes. But these details don't call attention to themselves, instead, they serve to establish visual memory. Unlike other books that read as serial episodes, Fun Home is unified in its presentation of the entangled fragments even on a visual level.

While it is entirely possible to read Fun Home on its surface level as a story of a daughter coming to terms with her father's mysterious death as it coincides with her own sexual coming-of-age, it is also a tour d'force in representing how lives can be traced and marked through literature. As one of those readers who lives amid fictional lives and the lives of authors, I was especially engaged by how central a role books play in the narrative. Focusing through the lens of those two modernist adventurers into memory, Proust and Joyce, the Bechdel family cycles through a long list of other writers: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ruskin, Camus, James, Shakespeare, Wilde, Nin, Hall, Rich, Daly, Collette, Austen, Salinger, Hemingway, Faulkner, Conrad, Homer, Woolf, Brown, Beach, Sarton, Millet and Johnston. Greek Myths and Bechdel's childhood journals also take on great importance. In Fun Home, both Bechdel's parents are English teachers and their letters and conversations integrate characters and authors into their daily activities and interactions with each other. As a family engaged in art, fiction and performance, Bechdel begins writing and drawing comics to carve out her own creative niche separate from the historical restoration of her father, the stage acting of her mother and the guitar playing of her brother. The recreated early comic efforts take their place next to Bechdel's journals, letters from her parents, and the remembered oral stories that her grandmother recounts. The photographs, films, magazines, novels, biographies and poems all mix in Fun Home's interrogation of the past and its exegesis of memory.

In a passage worthy of Bruce Bechdel's favorite novels — Proust's Remembrance of Time Past and Joyce's Ulysses — Bechdel cycles though the question of her father's life and death one more time: "What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Dad's thoughts about my thoughts about him, and his thoughts about my thoughts about his thoughts about me? He thought that I thought that he was a queer. Whereas he knew that I knew that he knew that I was too" (212). Without the literary allusions, Bechdel's questions are still universally compelling — what do our parents think about our lives? What would they think about how we see their lives? And how do we ever get to a point where we stop questioning those imagined or actual responses?

In terms of social history, Bechdel's Fun Home is an important story that documents two generations of homosexuality in America. First, there is the closeted life of the father, Bruce Bechdel, who married, had children, taught high school, restored Victorian houses in rural Pennsylvania, ran a funeral home, and had affairs with young men in secret. And second, there is the open life of his daughter who faces similar struggles but learns and lives through them and as times have changed has open relationships with women, protests for her rights, and ultimately creates a large body of art honoring both generations.

I don't think I'm overestimating or exaggerating the importance of Fun Home, by saying it has instantly raised the bar for graphic narratives and for traditional memoirs. It is certainly one of the best graphic narratives I have ever read, and one of the best books I've read in a long time.

Houghton Mifflin Books — Publisher's link for Fun Home
Dykes to Watch Out For — Bechdel's official website