Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (©2006, Vintage 2022)
A Lesbian friend of mine was surprised, even shocked, when I told her I hadn’t read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. I got the impression that she revised her opinion of my literacy on the spot.
Well, now I’ve read it and can hold my head high again.
Alison Bechdel is probably best known for the Bechdel test, which serves as a rough guide to a movie’s level of misogyny or otherwise: does it have more than one named female character? do they have a conversation about something other than a man? According to Wikipedia, Bechdel modestly attributes the invention of the test to a friend and ultimately to Virginia Woolf. But it still bears her name.
She is also celebrated as a creator of comics, in particular her long-running series Dykes to Watch Out for. The strip ran for 25 years, from 1983 to 2008, with a brief revival on Trump’s first election. Fun Home, published in 2006, brought her a wider readership. The book was a New York Times bestseller. It has been adapted into an audio-book and an award-winning stage musical, with a movie reportedly on the way. It has been included on college reading lists and Wikipedia currently lists eight attempts at having it banned in the USA. When I bought my copy the shop assistant enthused that she had studied it at university, but then read it again later for pleasure.
It’s a memoir. At first, it seems like a familiar tale of living with a tyrannical father who is emotionally distant and given to violent rages. But it develops into something much more complex and interesting. Towards the end of the first chapter, Alison and her brother are at Sunday Mass with their parents, and a caption reads: ‘He appeared to be an ideal husband and father.’ This is an ordinary observation about middle class families putting on a front for public display, but then there’s a second caption: ‘But would an ideal husband and father have sex with teenage boys?’ And that question hangs there unexplained for many pages, as the narrative takes us back to the family’s early life, the father’s part-time work as a mortician (which is where the book’s title comes from – it was the Bechdel children’s nickname for the undertaker’s business), and Alison’s own portrait of the artist as a young woman.
So the narrative moves back and forth, entwining the narrator’s own story as a nerdy young person with OCD who comes out as a Lesbian, with the unfolding story of her father’s sexuality, and the way it all plays out in the family. Key moments are hinted at, passed over as offstage events, and then revisited in detail much later, so that there’s a constant sense of something not yet revealed.
It’s a bookish family, and a bookish book, shot though with literary references. The story of Daedalus and Icarus forms a major thread, beginning with a father-and-daughter game of ‘airplane’ as seen on the cover – ‘In the circus acrobatics where one person lies on the floor balancing another are called ‘Icarian games’.– and leading in the final pages to a revisionist interpretation of the myth, applied to this story. Camus gets a look-in, and so do Proust, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, J. D. Salinger, A Chorus Line, Henry James, Shakespeare of course, and more – none of them incidental to the plot.
Page 77* may give you an idea of the art and the narrative style. Alison is nineteen, at college, and has just realised she is a Lesbian. The realisation has come about ‘in a manner consistent with [her] bookish upbringing. A revelation not of the flesh, but of the mind.’ There are a couple of pages that could be used as a reading list for a young person making a similar realisation; she attends a meeting of a Gay Union ‘in petrified silence’, and in the resulting exhilaration decides to come out to her parents:
If you enlarge this image you see how beautifully words and images are integrated. The captions offer a commentary on the action: ‘We were that sort of family,’ ‘He seemed strangely pleased,’ ‘I was devastated’. The page is a good example of Bechdel’s skill with dialogue: the father’s words on the phone convey his awkwardness quite independently of the caption’s commentary. The images are more than illustration – the technical term for this kind of story telling is ‘sequential art’, a different beast from ‘illustrated story’. We see how 19-year-old Alison lives: her clothes, the music she listens to, that she has to go to a post office box to receive mail, that her coming-out letter is typed, and composed with the assistance of a thesaurus. As often in this book, the images themselves include text: not just the names of books and records, but a glimpse of the mother’s letter, implying a documentary dimension to the narrative.
On the next page, there’s a fine example of the way the story is given to us bit by bit, layer by layer. We see Alison’s diary entry about her mother’s letter, which quotes part of the letter we are not shown here, hinting at the revelations yet to come about the father’s sexuality.
Like Art Spigelman’s Maus, Joe Sacco’s Palestine or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, this is a comic that people who don’t read comics would do well to spend a little time with. It might not make comic-readers out of them, but it may give them the same kind of pleasure as a good movie or novel.
I wrote this blog post on land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation, where a flock of corellas, which I think are visiting from inland country, have been making a lot of noise. I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and to any First Nations readers of this blog.
* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 77.
Me fail? I fly! 
