Fun Home (2006)

Alison Bechdel's thoughtful and complex memoir of her father and growing up in central Pennsylvania in the '60s and '70s, a graphic novel, airs a lot of her family's dirty laundry along the way. But she does so in such a forthright, straightforward, even clinical manner, like someone puzzling over the essentials of her life from the inside of a therapy session after years of working on it, that it comes to seem more clarifying and elucidating than one would ever expect. Her father was a high school English teacher and part-time mortician (the book's title comes from the family's nickname for the funeral home he operated), passionately devoted to literature and even more to projects of historical restoration. He was also, speculates Bechdel, a repressed gay man who lived the great majority of his life in quiet desperation in the small Pennsylvania town where he was born, eventually committing suicide. Whether Bechdel has the authority to make such judgments, as a gay woman out since her college days in the '80s and/or as a close observer of her father and family, is quite deliberately left for the reader to decide. His death, if it was a suicide, is maddeningly ambiguous. This memoir is perfectly wistful in capturing memories and feelings of youth and childhood with which anyone can identify, when Bechdel sets herself to that. What is more fascinating to me is the connection she explores between herself and her father over literature, a connection that is carefully developed and extended across the breadth of this memoir, which saves its most profound revelations for the closing chapter. Even more, the ways she uses her skills as a comic book artist are often surprisingly apt, in retrospect arguably the only way she could tell this story, one that is so deeply embedded in connections to lines of type running across printed pages that a good many panels here are exactly that, reproducing passages from a number of literary heavy hitters—Proust, Camus, Joyce, Colette, and others. For all of its frank and open revelations, Bechdel is careful to seal off the privacy of herself and her surviving family the further away from her father that she gets. I left this with an unsettling feeling of knowing both too much and not enough. I'd like to think she can follow this up with something that deepens the story further. But then I have to wonder how she could possibly do so. It seems to be a story that is finished, after all, loose threads and all.

In case it's not at the library.