Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 2006, ISBN 978-0-618-47794-4    

Plot Summary

In this graphic novel/ memoir Alison Bechdel, creator of the syndicated comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, narrates the story of her relationship with her father, a funeral home director and English teacher. Shortly after she comes out as a lesbian to her family, she begins putting the pieces of her family history together: her father’s fussiness in redecorating their Victorian home, the male “helpers” that he oftentimes had around, and the trial that centered around his buying a beer for a teenage boy. Shortly after Bechdel realizes that her father is a closeted gay man, her father dies in an accident that may have masked a suicide. With honesty and humor, Bechdel dives into her family stories of growing up in a funeral home with a distant father whose unrealized dreams and passions lead to an untimely end. Along the way, the reader learns more about Bechdel's path to realize her full identity as an artist and lesbian as she makes peace with her father's past.  

Critical Evaluation
This is no lightweight graphic novel. Some of Bechdel’s closest connections with her father came from their shared love of literature, and she references Joyce’s Ulysses and the myth of Icarus to make sense of her own family story, her relationship with her father, and his death.  She ponders the loss of her father as she considers his internal struggles. Did his personal sacrifices allow her the freedom to explore her full identity? What might his life have been had he been born in another time and place, not tied to the family funeral home or the small town where he was born and its stifling norms? These questions and more are the gems that await readers of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.

Reader’s Annotation
This is a captivating memoir that explores comic artist Alison Bechdel’s childhood growing up in a funeral home in a small town in Pennsylvania and her relationship with her father, a closeted gay man.

Information about the Author
On her website Dykes to Watch Out For, we learn about the author of Fun Home, “Alison Bechdel began keeping a journal at the age of ten, and has been assiduously archiving her own life and times with words and pictures ever since. For twenty-five years she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a generational chronicle considered “one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period.” (Ms.)

She is also the author of the best-selling Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which won an Eisner Award and was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. Time Magazine named Fun Home the number one Best Book of 2006, calling the memoir about her father, “A masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other.” Fun Home and Dykes to Watch Out For have been translated into many languages. Bechdel has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney’s, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times Book Review, and Granta, among other places. Bechdel lives near Burlington, Vermont.”

Curriculum Ties
N/A

Booktalking Ideas
On an overhead projector, show some panels of Bechdel’s work including renovations of the Victorian home, a childhood encounter with a corpse, Bechdel’s own coming out experience, and revelation of her father’s secret identity.

Reading Level/ Interest Age
Age 16+

Challenge Issues
This book has been challenged due to some sexual references and its gay subject matter. If the book were challenged, I would turn to ALA's Strategies and Tips for Dealing with Challenges to Library  Materials.

Why Included?
Many young people enjoy reading graphic novels, and this is one of the best graphic novel/ memoir combinations I’ve ever read. Also, I wanted to include within my  collections some books that would resonate with LGBTQ readers and allies.