Alison Bechdel is best known for her popular Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip. This graphic memoir tells the story of her early adolescence, her sexual awakening, her love of literature, and her complex, tempestuous relationship with her father, Bruce. Think of this as a queer mirror to Pat Conroy’s The Great Santini, and you are apt to get a pretty clear picture of what Bechdel is up to in this painful yet beautifully rendered portrait of a dysfunctional family. Unknown to Alison until after her father’s untimely death (he was run down by a Sunbeam Bread truck), Bruce was a closeted homosexual, high school English teacher (an unusual yet useful place to meet boys), restorer of Victorian homes, and the local undertaker (“Six Feet Under” references are worthy but this is a wholly original work). Bruce’s self-loathing coupled with his fiery relationship with Alison’s mother, makes for a pretty awkward family dynamic and Bechdel captures all of the heartbreaking ins and outs with humor, love and a kind of honesty that stings.
Sad, funny and extremely erudite, Fun Home is full of references to literature and the arts that fueled this father/daughter relationship. Fitzgerald, Wilde, Proust, Edward Albee, Albert Camus, Adrienne Rich, and James Joyce all play key roles in the narrative. At one point Bechdel equates her relationship with her dad with that of Stephen Dedalus and Leo Bloom in Ulysses. This book is as much about the pleasures of reading as it is about the complex manifestations of human identity and desire. Fun Home is also an intriguing glimpse into a period in American history, the 1970s, that seemingly transcended the uptight, puritanical ideologies that forced men like Bruce Bechdel into thier own private hell. Family truths begin to surface about the same time that Richard Nixon is being reamed by the US Congress. And later, in college, Alison’s realization that she is a lesbian converges with her discovery about her father’s death and his sexuality. At one point she wonders what might have happened if her father had not died but had drifted into the 1980s and collided into the AIDS epidemic: “maybe I’m trying to render my senseless personal loss meaningful by linking it, however, posthumously, to a more coherent narrative. A narrative of injustice, of sexual shame and fear, of life considered expendable. It’s tempting to say that,in fact, this is my father’s story. There’s a certain emotional expedience to claiming him as a tragic victim of homophobia, but that’s a problematic line of thought. For one thing it makes it harder for me to blame him. And for another, it leads to a peculiarly literal cul de sac. If my father had ‘come out’ in his youth, if he had not met and married my mother . . . where would that leave me?” This is a beautifully written and illustrated memoir. In no way have I done it justice, but I recommend it highly.
more on fun home here
the stolen child is way too unrealistic for me to even consider reading, but this sounds excellent. you make it especially attractive to me by describing it as “erudite.” i have little patience with “growing up as/in” memoires, even though biographies and autobiographies are more or less the only non-fiction books i read for fun. stories of childhood don’t appeal to me, and i tend to fast forward that childhood part in auto/biographies.
but if this is an “erudite” book (i mean this without any sarcasm), then i think i can handle it. i wanna be given more substance than just smells, sights, and sounds with which i cannot identify and that mean nothing to me. the poetry of childhood is lost on me. i don’t care about the fragrance of other people’s mothers’ freshly-baked bread and the feel of other people’s stiff linen sheets when they got into bed on cold winter nights. but i suspect i’ll be able to latch onto intellectual content and a well-written story (it is well written, right?). the only childhood memoir i remember thoroughly enjoying is oranges are not the only fruit. i also liked, surprisingly, angela’s ashes, not because of all the wrenching elements (i am so damn hard-hearted), but because of some truly hilarious passages.
i was interrupted.
i also liked the childhood part of janet frame’s autobiography, because she is such an extraordinarily poetic, unfrilly, and evocative writer. she crafts her prose with a precisions and spareness that leaves one breathless.
For what its worth, Fun Home: A Tragicomic is a big hit in the Turner household. Nicola and Sam have read it and both reacted very positively (though the memoir’s melancholic tendencies put my wife in a sad place). Sam is reading every graphic novel I own and he’s enamored with the form.
man o man. i went to the bookstore yesterday to buy this very book and discovered that it is, indeed, a graphic novel! what a shock. i have never, ever read a graphic novel. i got scared and left it there. that it cost $20 didn’t help. it’s back to interlibrary loan for me. but a graphic novel! why didn’t you say anything, jeff? i’m so intrigued by the whole graphic novel phenomenon, about which i know nothing.
Re-read the post. When I mentioned Bechdel wrote a popular comic (Dykes to Watch Out For) and then provided a hyperlink for you to check out her stuff, I guess I was trying to point readers in the right direction. Still, I wrote about this being a graphic memoir (since it is not a graphic novel), and I can understand how one might confuse how I might be using the word graphic. While we are talking about graphic novels, however, I’ll suggest three additional titles: Blankets by Craig Thompson, Ice Haven by Daniel Clowes and Black Hole by Charles Burns. They are all really good and reading them will provide you a wonderful opportunity to use the word imbricated, which is a classic “Reynolds is a Phi Beta Kappa” word and I’m glad you asked what it means as now I know as well. There is a truly lovely moment of imbrication in the final three pages of Fun House: A Tragicomic. More reason to light a fire under those librarians butts (or shell out the $20 if you’ve got it to spend as this is a great way to introduce yourself to the form, and I’m confident you will want to loan it out to your friends).
Hey-
Let’s do a graphic novel for the next selection. They’re fast reading! All them pictures. I’d be happy with any of the ones Jeff has named–why don’t you pick one, Turner?
Never having liked comic books much as a kid, I was always averse to the form, too. But Alan Moore’s Watchmen won me over–a funhouse of narrative play, as well as an exuberant deconstruction of comic book heroes, and yet equally good as a comic-book-hero mythology.
Other favorites: Art Spiegelman’s Maus, most everything I’ve read by Daniel Clowes, the astoundingly bleak but lovely Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Boy in the World by Chris Ware (probably the most beautifully-designed graphic novel ever made), and Palestine by Joe Sacco–who does graphic in-depth journalism. (I think Sacco would be very, very much up your alley, Gio.)
ha. just read these comments. i was relying on my email alert but i guess it doesn’t work. cool. i’m happy we are doing a graphic novel. talking about palestine, i wrote a letter to the paper about gaza and had simon send it in his name because they had just published one of mine. well, the poor man got quite the onslaught of hate calls and hate emails. unbelievable what people feel it’s okay to do. all everything over this very incendiary little letter!
Good letter. But, yeah–south Florida, I’m not surprised you got attacked. (I worked for a law firm, dealing primarily with condo and homeowners assocations, in West Palm… and I saw a lot of easily-provoked anger. Certainly not exclusively a Florida phenom, but people seemed to have a lot of access to their inner rage.)
You’d like the Sacco, G.
this is a nice way of saying this. hahaha. south florida definitely has its own brand of nuttiness and anger, and miami has just been declared by a study the city with the worst road rage. it’s an interesting place to live, though. i like its human landscape, especially the fact that the latino community is strong and integrated, unlike, say, california, where they are the servants and no one sees them except when they fill your water at the restaurant. the african american community, on the other hand… (not the mention those poor haitians, quel disaster!).
that was not simon, it was me. forgot the change the names in the fields.
i have read quite a bit of this between yesterday and today and i never would have thought that graphic books could be so damn powerful. wow. i’m a convert. more later.
In preparing for this Fall’s classes, I read Marjane Satrapi’s coming-of-age graphic memoir, Persepolis. It was great. As a narrative, it with great economy and clarity opens up the complications of politics and class and culture in the Shah’s Iran, following a long history of conquests. Marji, the protagonist, grapples with her own vision of God and with the rise of an Islamist state, idealizes her imprisoned Uncle (and scores points with her peers for his longer jail time, his greater torture) as well as Kim Wilde (“We’re the kids in America…”). And it’s gorgeously drawn, all black and white–heavily shadowed/inked, as if woodcut, ‘though it’s drawn. A child’s-book look to the people is complemented by a lovingly-detailed echo of Persian aesthetics… Good book.
yeah, now that i am a convert (what a large field of great books ahead of me!) i’ll read this, along with maus, the other one by the same author (too sleepy to remember), and the ones you and jeff recommend. i’m blown away by fun home. what an effective and powerful way to tell a story! as jeff says in his post, the writing is astounding and the erudition is both impressive and highly engaging. but what impresses me most is the fact that the comics format allows the writer to jump effortlessly back and forth in time, following a concentric, coil-like narrative that starts with a wide circle and revisits previously-told stories with a clearer and clearer insight in their significance. narratively, this is definitely a tour the force and i’d love to see it in a movie. apart from richard linklater, are there any other filmmkers who do grown-up, realistic features with drawings?
Well, the Harvey Pekar movie comes close . . . what was that called, American Splendor, I think, and it is a great, great piece of filmmaking.
oh right, i saw that, it was really good.
did you find this book upsetting? i’m asking because i am, but it may just be me. in fact, i think i find all childhood memoirs upsetting, so yes, it must be me. i had to stop reading doris lessing’s autobiography (the first volume, don’t remember the title), cuz i was getting all upset, but for the life of me i cannot remember nothing that was even remotely upsetting about it. (is it normal to find childhood memoirs upsetting? are they meant to be? you are the childhood expert, aren’t you?).
I found it more melancholic than upsetting. Narratives about negotiating one’s identity always make me sad (and draw me in like a train wrech) because my own personal negotiations were frought with anxiety and the sense that I was definately not like the other kids with whom I found myself interacting (avoiding, self-fabricating/self-fashioning, desiring, etc.). Add to that the general challenges of growing up in a household that was never reflected on the television or in the cinema, the general challenges of attempting to be the “right” son for my father, the “best” brother for my brother, not to mention the challenges of being the “ideal” son for my mother . . . well, it all adds up and it is texts like this that both comfort AND induce a cringe or two of painful recollection.
yah.
childhood memoirs bring back our own difficult childhoods (did anyone not have a difficult childhood?) with their unresolved conflicts… and i guess i am quite happy not to go there, you know? so no, no comfort for me, just a painful feeling at the mouth of my stomach (literally, actually, in this case).
i’m fascinated by the proliferation of memoirs, and by my own desire/fantasy to produce one. i think it speaks somewhat badly of the world we live in, the disconnect, the difficulty to share experiences, our lack of closeness. but maybe we always had that. maybe it’s just another fantasy to think of times past as times in which people sat around and told each other… what? “you know, bob, i am a represssed homosexual.” “yeah, bill, i know what you mean. wanna talk about it?”
now, though, we have these great outlets — memoirs, blogs, chat rooms. maybe it’s all for the better, a way of getting the monsters out.