Fun Home: Dewey's review

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel is really a book for book lovers. There are frequent literary allusions, which mostly serve as comparisons to Bechdel's family life.

The book is autobiographical, and I've seen it referred to as a graphic memoir, a graphic novel or a graphic autobiography. It's not a novel, and I think I prefer the term graphic memoir, though I find it much more well-written than most memoirs. The language and the insights are both far more sophisticated than I'm used to seeing memoirs, yet the comics format makes the book extremely accessible, even to those who won't really understand all the allusions.

Bechdel's drawings are perfect for this story: they're simple enough that at points when you're really caught up in the narrative, they stay unobtrusive, but they also capture facial expressions and surroundings beautifully. I knew only a couple pages in that I would want to re-read it almost immediately, so as to spend more time on the drawings.

Bechdel's family consists of two English teacher parents (one of whom also ran the family funeral home business) and two brothers who mostly remain in the background. A large portion of the book is spent exploring Bechdel's childhood relationship with her father, who is very demanding and rather detached. Bechdel goes off to college, and suddenly all sorts of things happen at once, which I can't go into in much detail without serious spoilers. Though the sudden avalanche of events might in other circumstances be a lot to absorb after the slow-paced meander through Bechdel's childhood, it doesn't seem rushed or shocking. Since the story is told from the perspective of the adult Bechdel, most of these things don't surprise the reader at all by the time they occur in the narrative.

Bechdel also writes a comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For, which has been running for over 20 years. The strips have been gathered into many collections, none of which I've read, though the first one has been on my wishlist for a couple years. I've read, though, that the strips in the first 1 1/2 collections are individual comics, with no cohesive storyline, and that the main characters and storyline start to develop in the middle of the second book, so I'll add that to my wishlist, too, and double my chance of being able to get started reading that series.

In the meantime, I found Bechdel's blog. For me, the most interesting part of the blog is the strip archive, at least until such a time as I can begin reading the collections. I'm not sure I'll like them as much as Fun Home. It's pretty hard to beat. I just told my husband he probably wants to read it right away, and said to him that it's right up there with Maus and Blankets.

Here's a news segment about Bechdel and her work.



Why was it banned? Its removal from libraries has been requested by patrons, but the only reason I could find was that these patrons deemed it "inappropriate."