By Alison Bechdel
2006 Jonathan Cape
232 pages
I'd been waiting for a while for another book that I can't put down. This was the one. In "Fun Home", Alison Bechdel recounts her youth in comic form that can only be compared to Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis". But, while "Persepolis" is the story of Satrapi's youth in post-revolutionary Iran, Bechdel's is a memoir of becoming, of womanhood, of sexuality, tying together her own lesbian awakening with her father's closeted homosexual shame in suburban postwar America.The Bechdel's run a funeral home (the "fun home"). While Alison's mother is writing her master's thesis and starring in amateur stage productions, her father is a part-time English teacher and part-time funeral director obsessed with renovations and pseudo-intellectual activities. Bechdel describes in beautiful and humorous yet painfully insightful detail their psychologically complex relationship that came to a sudden end with his suicide. Full of fantastic passages and scenes, Bechdel engrosses her reader in the tragi-comic details of growing up, coming to terms with the anguish pervading our selves and our loved ones.
I cannot recommend it enough. It's fun, quick and easy read -- it's a graphic novel after all. Book lovers will love the repeated references to literary classics, as well as philosophy and then-contemporary political events, movements and ideas. Well done, Alison Bechdel. I'm already looking forward to her next one.
(Bechdel, p. 218)
