Alison’s Bechdel (creator or, more accurately, popularizer of the Bechdel Test) created a memoir that is part coming out story and part My Girl in her graphic novel Fun Home. When I was reading how she grew up in a funeral home, then the My Girl movie kept popping up in my mind, even though this was a vastly different story. I’m usually leery of memoirs. My feelings are that if someone had a nice fun boring life, then they wouldn’t write a memoir. It’s only when something goes really wrong that people feel the need to write about it. And those stories are usually fairly depressing (when something bad happens) or boring (when nothing happens), I usually just pass them by. But with all the good reviews Bechdel received, I decided to try Fun Home. So let’s see what growing up is like in a funeral home:

For those of you who don’t know it, Alison Bechdel had a great alternative comic strip known as Dykes to Watch Out For. It was The L Word,  in comic strip form, before The L Word ever existed. It was run in mainly alternative and gay/lesbian magazines and was probably the first semi-mainstream depiction of the homosexual lifestyle in comic strips. The strip alternated between soap opera and hot topics of the week. Unfortunately Bechdel discontinued the strip in 2008 after a 25 year run. And while she covered many, many topics in her comic strip, the one topic she never really delved into was Alison Bechdel. Fun Home fixes that. But, to some extent, the book is more about her father than her.

To start with, Fun Home was the nickname for the family funeral home. Her father grew up in the business, but then joined the army. His wife joined him in Europe while he was stationed there and they stayed after he left the service. When she was pregnant (with Alison), his father had a heart attack and they came back to run the family business. At many, many times in the book, Bechdel wonders how her father’s life would have been different if they stayed in Europe.

Back in the states, they had a second child and bought an old, run down historic house. Her father poured blood, sweat, tears and an eye for bargains into the house and made it into almost a museum. He was not physically expressive, and seemed more interested in refurbishing the house than his family. Since they lived in a small town (which meant few funerals) he took a job as an English teacher in a high school. He always had a book to recommend and often recruited students from his class to help out around the house.

The book is non-linear, but focuses a lot on Bechdel’s upbringing and her father’s death, which may have been a suicide. It was an open, but unsaid secret that her father was gay. The students who helped out around the house were not there for the kids. But, he was a proper married man in a small town and couldn’t live that life. Her mom knew, but lived with it and hid it from the kids. While Alison was away at college, she gathered her strength to send her parents a typewritten note that she was a lesbian. A few days later, she got a phone call from her Mom who told her that Dad was gay and had a series of affairs with other men.

This leads to the most heartbreaking pages in the whole book for me. Alison and her father have a discussion on the way to a movie about them both being homosexual. It’s heartbreaking to see a father trapped in a closet with his daughter who has come out. This lays out the whole core of the story. The fact that, for the most part, Alison and her father are carbon copies of each other. They share many of the same interests and experienced the same things, but it’s too different for her father to handle. She only saw him one more time before his death and they didn’t have a followup discussion.

While the book does talk about her Mom to some extent, Mom and brothers are pretty much just their to round out the family. This is a story about a daughter and her father and the bonds they shared. Bechdel styled the book as a recursive introspection of her life and her father’s life. The topics and time goes around and around in circles until it finally centers on the brief discussion of the common homosexuality. It’s a wonderful, heartbreaking book that deserves all the honors it received. Bechdel never has been the most gifted of illustrators. Her design sense is top notch even if her art is simply workman-like. But don’t let the art drag you out of the story. It is an interesting story, well-told and well made. The circular nature of the book brings out more and more of story and her life as well as her father’s. This is an exciting and challenging book that should be more widely read. Highly recommended.