Fun Home is a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, the cartoonist behind Dykes to Watch Out For, a long-running comic strip about dykes and dykey things. It came out in 2006, so if you care very much about dykes, graphic novels, funeral homes, etc., you are probably aware of it. Entertainment Weekly even put it on their list of best books of the freakin' decade.
Even though Entertainment Weekly loves it, you shouldn't hold that against Fun Home. It really is a good book! It's also a great graphic novel. A memoir where the images explicate the words, it is exquisitely detailed but never stiff and dull. The drawing style keeps things lighter than they might otherwise be...considering the heavy subjects touched upon, such as mortality and even suicide. It is both funny and deep, engaging and analytical: everything the best comics are.
And it is a very gay work. Alison, of course, is thoroughly lesbian, having come out in college and drawn a comic strip about dykes for 25 G-d damn years.
But her dad was also queer. He was a high school English teacher and had relationships with some of his older students, which really did a number on his marriage. He was even arrested and prosecuted for giving a beer to an underage boy. He also had relationships with fellow soldiers in the service, during his time in the Army during the 1950s.
Even though he had strong feelings for males his entire life, he got married and had children, as many people did back then and still do. This was to the detriment of everyone involved. When his wife, exhausted by his affairs and verbal abuse, finally asked him for a divorce (Alison was 20 by then), he was hit by a truck soon afterward. Fun Home speculates that it was suicide, but nobody knows for certain.
On the lighter side, Alison's father was also obsessed with fashion, flowers, and period restoration. He seems to have taken out his more femme proclivities on poor Alison. Some of the strongest parts of the book focus on their power struggle. He was a tyrant for velvet and precise flower arrangement. There is a certain poetic justice in the man's only daughter growing up to be butch dyke.
The plot of the book is elliptical, driven forward more by ideas than by actions. The central event of the book is Alison's father's death, so soon after the threat of divorce, and only 2 weeks after she came out. To add to the memetic swirl, her father was also the town funeral director. The funeral home is introduced early in the book; it is the titular "Fun Home". Its presence hangs over everything as a shadow of death.
Another theme in the book is literature. Alison's father was very fond of F. Scott Fitzgerald as a young man; later in the book, it's James Joyce; and the Greek myth of Daedalus is alluded to early on. There are also references to Proust. However, the book is still accessible even if your idea of high literature is High Times.
This is truly the sort of book you read again and again, picking up more with each reading. It's not just about living with a frustrated, closeted dad as a young lesbian...it's about death, it's about family, it's about how literature informs and affects one's life.
I give the book 4 stars.
1 star for "being a cartoon that's less cartoonish than the last two movies I've seen"
1 star for "taking on Dad touching boys in a calm, collected manner"
1 star for "still being entertaining despite all of the above"
And 1 star for "1950s truck stop butches"
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