Table of Content
Once I start a book, I have a hard time stopping and just don't want to get myself where I can't get out and it's too late. I can’t really say I enjoyed this book — I found it dark and disturbing in many ways. I think I read it pretty much straight through. I'm a herosexual males, and picked up this book, after reading an article Bout how the right-wing states banned it from libraries. Excellent read, and though I'm hetero, I get the dysfunction. By essentially putting her father's homosexuality and pedophilia in the same category, this author is perpetuating EXTREMELY harmful and negative stereotypes about gay men.
There's so much left that I didn't talk about yet, but I suppose it won't do any good to say much more. This book is an absolutely astonishing delight, and if I haven't convinced you of that yet, I'm not going to bother trying anymore. I know that Fun Home isn't designed to make me happy. I'm cool with experiences that aren't as fun as being drunk on a rollercoaster.
Synopses & Reviews
Alison also compares Bruce to Marcel Proust in the way they intermingled their lives with fiction in order to conceal their homosexual proclivities, as well as their mutual obsession with the beauty of flowers. A smart and thoughtful reflection on the many places where the author's life paralleled her father's. I was most surprised by how generous she was to her father's memory -- maybe too generous, in my opinion. Because the author has no distance from the subject at hand, the reader is free to draw their own conclusions more so than in a piece of fiction. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel takes its place alongside the unnerving, memorable, darkly funny family memoirs of Augusten Burroughs and Mary Karr. It's a father-daughter tale pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings and — like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis — a story exhilaratingly suited to the graphic memoir form.
Alison can also make the most simplistic details - Road Runner on the TV; period cars; recurring appearances of the Sun Beam Bread logo - realistic, melancholy, and heartrending all at once. Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Alison ends the story with an image of her jumping off a diving board into a pool as a young girl, with Bruce there to catch her. Alison narrates that Icarus—and Bruce—did hurtle into the sea, but Bruce “was there to catch” Alison when she leapt. Shortly before Bruce’s death, Alison narrates that she had an eerie dream in which the two of them try to view a sunset but Bruce, lagging behind, misses it.
Ratings and reviews
In Fun Home Bechdel illustrates and writes about living in a dysfunctional, Victorian house, and she includes an abundance of literary references within a nonlinear format. But she focuses this seven-year effort on her father, a man who displays enough complexity to evoke sympathy despite his darker sides. Alison Bechdel's art and narrative are fantastic, with layer upon layer of meaning rarely seen in a comic book. The interspersion of literary passages, historical and geographical allusions and personal memoirs is done with consummate mastery, so that the main theme of the book is always in the limelight. And the panels are drawn with a lot of thought given to the exact layout so that the pictures enhance the flow of the narrative seamlessly. I went out and bought this book immediately after hearing a paper on it at a recent conference.
Alison’s mother Helen was equally obsessive in her own artistic pursuits, which mostly concerned her acting in community theater plays. The house, then, felt to Alison like an artists’ colony, with each member of the family compulsively absorbed in his or her own pursuits. Alison discusses the evolution of her O.C.D., which entered her diary first in the form of self-doubt, such that she would write, “I think” between each declarative statement. It then got so bad that she would scribble “I think” over each entry, causing Helen to take Alison’s diary away until Alison decided to break her compulsions, which she eventually did. Elizabeth – I agree this book wasn’t necessarily enjoyable, but I didn’t want to put it down either.
More by Alison Bechdel
Practically the only thing that stands out is the dark porch of the house, which forms stripes with its columns -- but it's basically being crowded out by a huge text book even in its own panel! The next negative space to draw the eye is the window behind the ivy in the bottom left hand corner, which is again misleading, because the text indicates should be looking at the flower in the foreground, not at the black background. In this graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father. This graphic memoir has been on my to read list for what feels like ages, so I felt entirely satisfied when I completed reading it. Allison offers elegant prose - pleasure - intelligence- and compassion-- through literary references....reflecting on classics read that both she and her dad enjoyed .
But we would never discuss our shared predilection again. 1-star review is because, for me, it's 1 star. I'm not a pro reviewer or anything, and I don't feel responsible to rate something as I imagine it would be rated by the general public. Nor is that a worthwhile exercise because you can see the average rating, so go with that. "Joan was not just a visionary and activist, but a bona fide cyclops...she'd lost one eye in a childhood accident vividly reminiscent of the way Odysseus blinded Polyphemus." Note the figurative black cloud hanging over Akito on the far right, that comes to infect the rest of the page as well.
And maybe what's most fascinating about her attempts to identify her homosexuality to her father's sexual life is all of the possible identifications she has to shut down to get there. Identifying with her father means she doesn't have to identify with the teenage boys he exploited, placing his desires before their autonomy. Naming her coming out of the closet as the catalyst for her father's death removes blame from her mother, whose request for divorce might otherwise provide a suicide motive. At the same time it erases the possibility that coming out of the closet prompted her mother to ask for the divorce, moved to escape a sham marriage by her own daughter's unwillingness to play along with convention.
Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the Fun Home. It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve. Alison then wonders about how her own coming out of the closet might have impacted Bruce’s suicide. Four months before, after realizing she was a lesbian by reading about homosexuals in a library book, Alison had written her parents a letter in which she came out. Alison notes how books were just as important to Bruce’s intellectual development as her own, and she delves into his youthful obsession with F.
But what I do have in common with Bechdel's perspective on her father, is this perplexity, subliminal resentment and an amused incredulity about his life and his deeds. How can he be just a person existing in the past tense now? At least she must have achieved some kind of closure through the creation of this part graphic memoir part literary essay on remembering a loved one. Alison Bechdel’s coming of age tale is a difficult one. It was easy to sympathize with young Alison who must have been like a ship lost at sea.
All Kinds of Lives
In the end, I was compelled to pick up Fun Home completely on a whim. Though I flew through it, a lot of the literary references went shamefully over my head. And considering that it was such a big focus here, I was left out of the loop a lot, which ended up lowering my enjoyment while reading. Unlike Bruce Bechdel who grappled with the stark contradiction between his public reality and private urges all his life, my father didn't particularly have any skeletons in his closet. And even if he did I have no way of unraveling that mystery now.
Fun Home is both a daughter's efforts to make sense of her father's life and death as it is an account of growing up uncomfortable in your own skin, of knowing you are different but being afraid of acknowledging it for fear everything might change, even though it should. It's a story of coming to terms with who you are, while remembering a man who really never had that luxury. When Alison was in college, she came out to her parents as a lesbian.
In the book, Bechdel analyzes her memories, experiences and extant documents, and uses literature to try to understand her father and tell a story about her family and about herself. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books.
I know it's not the father, because his hobbies are rendered with no particular attention to detail (again, the scribble-flowers), but there's nothing to visually indicate it's one of the children either. The size and overwhelming green-ness of the giant left panel immediately draw my eye. And the lines of the horizon and the trees bring my eye up and impart a sense of awe.
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