Fun Home

After books like this I lament my lack of a silver-tongued gift for persuasion. I’m robbed of the secondary pleasures of waiting for a friend to read it and hoping they feel the exuberance and tenderness I felt as I reached the end. The book is a memoir of Alison Bechdel’s youth in a rural Pennsylvania town and her father’s death while she was away at college. It opens with her and her father playing airplane as she recalls the story of another father and child, Icarus and Daedalus.

She circles through her story repeatedly but peels away new insights each time. Each time through she finds a way to fit the details of her life into a literary or historical narrative. Sometimes she describes her family life with passages from Proust. Sometimes her story finds resonance in Nixon’s resignation. But the larger narrative that all the stories fit into is one dealing with Homer’s Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses. A device that could be pretentious but isn’t because she carries the novice reader into those stories at the same time. It also makes practical sense that the daughter of an english teacher and actress would frame her narrative with those books.

Her illustrations carry on the same narrative. A snake devouring its own tale reminds us of the narrative circles. Book titles casually appear in the background to clue the reader in to what is happening. Pop-up Video style balloons call our attention to minute details that add color to the story (is this subtext?). The image that will stay with me the longest is her and her father silhouetted by a setting sun as they stand on the porch of the family’s Gothic Revival style home. She is playfully hanging off a column, and he’s standing in quiet reverie watching all the colors mix.

What charmed me the most is how honestly she comes at the story of her youth, which is apparently the story of her father. She chronicles the highs and the lows without melodrama. She doesn’t hesitate to offer up her own conflicted understanding. The literary devices she does use she is almost apologetic for and reminds the reader that it isn’t pretension but these are the tools she was brought up with for understanding her world.

After the strength of this and fellow Eisner nominee American Born Chinese I am sure to check out the other Best New Graphic Album nominees.