Content warning: suicide, grief, broken families, child abuse, mental illness i.e. depression and OCD, child molestation.
'Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic' - a graphic novel memoir worthy of the likes of 'Persepolis'.
When first reading the mixed reviews, I did not expect to pick up, let along love, this raw and painful coming-of-age/ family drama graphic memoir at all. But since I'd heard of Alison Bechdel and her coming up with the standard feminist media critique of "The Bechdel Test" years and years ago, more than this book I'm surprised at myself for not reading anything by her until now. I'd only recently heard of a musical adaptation. So I thought, hey, if it's that popular and mainstream, then why not give it a go?
I think there are some stories that are better told in graphic novel form. I think that if 'Fun Home' had been written entirely in prose, I would have found it pretentious and boring as hell. But in the way that it is expressed in this medium, in this simple yet gloomy art style, it becomes powerful and evocative. It is more original and humanistic. Alison Bechdel's autobiography, and her musings on her family and life and the classic works of literature she attempts to interconnect it all - to make sense of it all, to give meaning to the meaningless - is suddenly graphic, in more than one sense. It's desperate and reaching, yet cathartic. Any creative type can relate to it.
Bechdel may realise the futility of paralleling her own story and identity as a lesbian with the old stories of white men, who may or may not have been queer themselves, and their insecurities and frustrations at life might stem from that. Either way, works of women and more overt queer people (though Colette is read in the memoir too) should be taught in the curriculum as equals to Homer, Proust, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Salinger, Joyce, etc.
'Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic' is itself a good start. It is Bechdel's "Odyssey" as she puts it, and it revolves around her relationship with her closeted father, who had died of apparent suicide.
The book is very real, honest and shocking, as a memoir of someone's life should be. Alison Bechdel's earlier life was dysfunctional, full of secrets (like in every family), and utterly believable and harrowing. Not half of which comes from Bechdel growing up in a funeral home business, so death has been present from the start. Having a depressed, orderly, controlling, borderline abusive and emotionally distant father, as well as a very distant theatrical and thesis-writing mother, I could see Bechdel's struggles and desperation to understand her family throughout. She also has two brothers, who, if not exactly happy, seem fairly "normal" and "functional" like her.
She doesn't just talk about her father, a paradoxical figure of great admiration, bafflement and fear, and books, in almost streams of consciousness as she tries to grasp for reasons why her father did what he did; she also relates when and how she discovered her own sexuality. Leading up to this are her childhood preference for being masculine (in hair and clothing, plus seeing a "bull dyke" for the first time), her first period (and her not telling her mother right away), her troubles in writing anything thorough and honest in her diary entries, her OCD, her first orgasm, and her picking up books on homosexuality. Add in dashes of mythological, phallic and literary symbolism and Easter eggs on nearly every page, and the reader is in for a devastatingly real but enlightening and interesting experience.
It is a tragedy. We all experience it in out lives. Grief is a black, terrifying, monstrous, traumatic, heartbreaking, confusing and empty void, and eventually - for it does happen, it has to - we deal with it; we move on from it in thousands and thousands of different ways. Alison Bechdel processes her own loss and grief in the form of a comic.
'Fun Home' isn't amusing, in my opinion, and it contains no funny moments. But there is a bittersweetness and strange hope to be found in its pages, for not every person in Bechdel's life is miserable, of course, and any nihilistic viewpoint conveyed isn't oppressive and suffocating. Catharsis is key. Amazingly, it is accessible for anyone old enough to know about these human issues (not necessarily "adult" issues, for sexual orientation, mental illness and death have nothing to do with not being "family friendly").
If there is one serious downgrade to give the tragicomic, however, it's the offhand mention by Bechdel's mother on the phone with her that her father was molested as a child, right after revealing his affairs with men and teenage boys. This is...unfortunate. And is never brought up again. Additionally, only white people seem to be present, most disconcertingly.
A few overlooked and disturbing implications aside, 'Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic' comes recommended by yours truly. The avant-garde piece engrossed, absorbed, and touched me greatly. It can be frustrating and complicated, but that is life. I can see why it would be viewed as pretentious, but that's the author, the artist, merely trying to make sense of her own story, to give it meaning and hope, in a way that feels natural to her. With or without her family, and the ways they influenced her, she makes it on her own. She isn't a side note or joker in her parents' story, a dysfunctional mess of (limited) choices, done just to fit into society's limited, stifling boxes.
Alison Bechdel breaks free of that.
Loving your parents while trying not to make the same mistakes they did is one of life's inevitable paradoxes. And wonders.
Final Score: 4.5/5
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