Fun home
Ratings275
Average rating4
Well, it is a memoir, after all. History has to be tedious, so she gets points for authenticity.
This was an interesting read about relationships and discovery of self. The writing was beautiful and kept me reading but I couldn't find myself caring about any character. I read this as part of our banned book week here at our library where we celebrate banned books.
~Ashley
This is not a review, just some rambling. I liked this book, a lot.
At one point in Fun Home, Bechdel wonders what a father is. She ventures into the dictionary and finds a tautology. I think about what it is to be a father a lot, and what it is to have a father. I haven't spoken to mine in a long time.
Later, Bechdel recounts a period of life where she and her father have a currency, a common language. I put the book down there and wondered if my father and I ever had one. It's probably been close to ten years since I spoke to him; certainly, since I meaningfully spoke with him. More? Even so far removed in time, it's hard to get through my immediate simmering rage or cold disdain to think about positive traits that he had. I have spent my life doing all that I can to not be him, searching for similarities and erasing them if any sprout. Positive traits. He must have had some, sometime. What drew my mom to him? It surely wasn't the 9-year age difference.
I know that he was charismatic. Perhaps he still is? Sometimes I'll describe him as a master manipulator, though I suspect that's a bit grand. Perhaps I pump it up because, in some small way, I want to feel that I won something. I'm not sure master manipulators flame out in St. Louis or central Illinois and have their lives collapse in on themselves. At least, not before the age of 50.
I know that we have the same name. Nearly. He is a Junior, I'm a Third. Rich man's title, poor man's bank account.
I know that he worked on cars. He had a 1967 Mustang, a glistening blue bolt. He worked on it in his blue Morton building. Raspberries grew on the north side of it. I remember being in the side seat with him going from — to — on the highway. I remember him asking me something, my enthusiasm. The engine. The thunderous horses as the fields ripped away. Smiling and laughing.
I remember driving from St. Louis to —. I remember sitting next to him in the 1966 Impala. Screeching doors and mumbling engine. A color theoretically white, once. I remember seeing a Lamborghini in the contraflow and turning my head to follow as he tearfully explained the newest collapse of life. Always the crying.
I lived with him in —, a suburb of St. Louis. Not enrolled in school, but variously wondering alone around town or sitting in the bodyshop's office. Snooping around and finding an ancient green-on-black computer terminal, or a closetful of porno discs in a black trash bag at the bottom of a closet. Or burnt spoons. The smell. Always the smell.
We came home to the little green house his sponsor rented to him. Locks changed. I'd moved most everything I owned into the house. I never saw it again. The little maroon King James Bible my great-grandparents bought me.
How long before that — I remember thinking that I could end it if I went outside and got a shovel and hurled it into his head. ‘It' being his beating down a door that my mom was behind. Who remembers what the fight was about? He wasn't a hitter, though.
I remember him picking up a little, thick, white-covered copy of Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I think it was the Signet Edition, though my memory has it about twice as thick. Perhaps it seemed bigger because I was nine or ten years old. It certainly seemed thicker when it smacked into me. Punishment for taking books out of the library, unchecked. Returning them without alerting the librarian was a logistical affair, but what stands out is his condemnation between blows, “I won't have a thief living in my house!”
I remember at most two years later his firing and conviction for embezzlement. When I looked later, did that court website say more than or less than one-hundred thousand dollars? Certainly, enough to buy all kinds of photographic equipment to take nude pictures of prostitutes. Not to mention a lot of crack cocaine.
Goodbye bungalow, someday to be pushed in. Hello, little factory-adjacent apartment. Do you remember the way the air smelled at the top of your closet, where you'd hide and write on the topmost shelf? Yes. A green stain on pink, plush carpet. Silly putty. Bright side: no more mowing.
I remember after that drive living with his father. Grandpa Tom, rather than Dad. Grandpa Tom was nice, as was Grandma Debbie. They still are. I remember getting angrier and angrier, having been snapped out of my brainwashing by the loss of my material possessions, and whatever shattered illusions I had. Very capitalist. What had possessed me to think so fondly about that one night spent alone in a roach-filled motel in East St. Louis? Was it its freely available, grainy, porn channel that my little eleven-year-old self found so novel? Maybe it was the interesting way that the police cruiser circled the parking lot once an hour. I only know because I kept looking out the window, wondering why going to grab some Marlboro's was taking so long.
Some time later, after his release from prison, I had a confrontation with him. I'd envisioned a fight. Anticipated. Craved? Relished? Intended to relish. How best to take all of the anger out but to tell him I was gay. I'd hoped to wait until my great-grandma was dead, but she was still inside the doublewide in her slow death. Destined for a hospital and for that black bile to be pulled from her in a tube. Compassionate healthcare at the age of 92. He was sitting on her patio, in her glider. The glider is a double seater with a little table-like space built in. It has two hearts in the center. It is still there today, unmoved.
Of course, I did not get the fight that I wanted. He pivoted so easily to whatever was said, some variant of everlasting love. Unconditional Who knows its depth? I didn't believe it for a moment, and I can't remember anything more of the conversation, not even anything worth lying about. I just remember spoiling for a fight. You can never tell the truth when you always lie.
———
I had that reaction a lot, coming out. I remember standing in the UIC Forum when the gay marriage bill was signed in Illinois. I was standing at the very back of the room, so terrified that my mere presence would say something I'd said to so few people. I had no reaction at all to the bill signing other than to think, “I'm too late, the fight is over.” What fight did I think I had in me? Imagine being in 2013 and thinking the fight is over. I'd just turned 19 a few weeks before, what did I know? I didn't even know myself.
The fight I was spoiling for probably wasn't about being gay. Twelve years after that moment, it isn't being gay that I have rageful dreams about. At most, my dreams about being gay are vaguely frustrated at not being both pretty and gay.
———
This to say, I do not know what common language I have with my father. Unlike him, I am not currently in the Midwest dying of lymphoma, or some such cancer. Dying awfully slowly, as far as it seems. I know that when I started watching Top Gear, I was afraid to enjoy it, because cars were my dad's domain. While I could be in that Morton building, I couldn't touch anything, and I wasn't taught anything. The progeny of a long line of mechanics that doesn't know how to change a tire and refuses now to learn.
When I started taking pictures I had a nagging somewhere in the brain matter, too. Just like pops, hm? What lovely local prostitute will you be photographing? Will you seek one out with the same name as your mother, like he did? Thankfully, I don't know any male sex workers. Let alone any called Jennifer.
———
There must be good things about this person. They're for other people. They are, I hope, for the little blond-haired and blue-eyed boy that his partner seems to have in the pictures. It is impossible to see pictures of that child on his lap and not recall the picture of me in my little white button-up shirt and suspenders, blond-hair and blue-eyes, looking so happy in whatever local JC Penny the picture was probably taken in.
———
All this wallowing to say that the book made me tearful. Bechdel's life and my life are not similar. Other than, perhaps, the fleeing to the library stacks and trying to understand just what the fuck is going on by reading books. That, I understand. It is beautiful, and honest, and searching. I loved it.
Pretty weird that it made me want to read Joyce's Ulysses, though.
Bechdel had such a childhood experience, this book's structure works so well constructing the narrative she wants, the leaps forth and back in time slowly releasing new information about periods that she leaped over, showcasing her experiences and struggles one after the other. The way she kneads her relationship with her father as she works through it in this autobiography, coming to terms with it is magical. I loved how she portrays things so elegantly, her explanations of complex topics and the like. This book is amazing! Must read for fans of biographies.
Finally got around to reading this classic queer graphic memoir because it was #35 on the New York Times best books of the 21st century list. (They made a musical out of this? Did it put the “fun” in “dysfunctional family”?) Off to find the sequel [b:Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama 11566956 Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama Alison Bechdel https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1511409644l/11566956.SX50.jpg 16507555]
I don't know. Could I read a more pretentious book? Probably, but this was pretty high up there.
Story: 7 / 10
Characters: 8.5
Setting: 6.5
Prose: 10
Art: 7
Although the book was well done and is considered one of the best graphic novels ever written, it did not appeal to me at all. I would only recommend it to literary fiction readers.
4 stars “But in a way Gatsby's pristine books and my father's worn ones signify the same thing–the preference of a fiction to reality.”
If you only know Bechdel from her comic strip, like I did, this will feel both familiar and alien. The art is unmistakeably hers: clean, rich in detail but not distractingly so, greatly enhancing her narrative. The narrative: that's less recognizable. It's raw, often uncomfortable; not to mention book-length. And it works! She has an incredible voice, and I find I prefer this format over DTWOF which I often found cramped. Here she has space to move more gently; without the need for wisecracks or bon mots—they're present, just paced more deliberately. She feels genuine. Vulnerable. And hella strong.
(If you don't know Bechdel, you should. Would I recommend this as your introduction? I don't know. It can be heavy. The coldness of her upbringing is every-page heartbreaking; her parents' loneliness overwhelming. But yeah, even if you aren't a fan, I would say: start here.)
This is an intriguing memoir that only reinforced my ever present doubt that there are indeed happy families out there. It feels like all adults get to a point where they give up on being their authentic selves, embrace their masks and play roles that eat them from the inside. And they don't realize they're just making life more unbearable for themselves and everyone else around them. Everyone's walking with a metaphorical cross on their shoulders and then they pass it on to their children.
It is a meaningful story yet I always felt kept at an arm's length and the art itself wasn't as compelling as I hoped so I can't say this will be one of my favorites.
I loved this graphic auto-biography. It was a different way to read about someone's life. I thoroughly enjoyed this read. I really liked how Bechdel would add in diary entries for clarification of how she was able to know so much of the past, and when her diary was total bullshit. It was good, really really good.
An autobiographical graphic novel by Alison Bechdel (yes, of the test) about growing up and discovering her own sexuality in a house that is dominated by her idiosyncratic closeted father. About the bonds and the damages their father-daughter relationship brought forth, and the legacy she's trying to escape/untangle.
Although we share an alma mater, Alison Bechdel is sufficiently older than me that when I first heard of her, she was already a realtively famous sensation, with a popular webcomic, which was soon to be followed by an eponymous test that would be cited in every feminist movie review for the rest of time. So, thinking about her as an unassuming child, forced into girly clothing was a little odd.
Usually, memoir (especially graphic memoir) is form over substance, as no one's real life is actually very interesting, but Bechdel's childhood may be an exception to that rule. Her early years are dominated by a gothic house, kept to exacting detail; a mortuary that seems to resurface in the narrative at particularly apropos moments and a relationship with her father that is largely dominated by F. Scott Fitzgerald allusions.
Bechdel drops hints along the way that she is not the most reliable of narrators, and I found that although Fun Home is ostensibly about her dad, it's mostly about how Alison Bechdel cast him as a foil in her own life, and then uses that to reinterpret her own.
Last night, I saw the musical adaptation of this graphic novel, and it was a striking show. They had a t-shirt for sale depicting audience members leaving the theater saying, “That's exactly like my family except completely different.” I think those words speak for the original piece as well. I don't have a lot in common with Alison Bechdel on the surface. I've never struggled sexual identity, obsessive compulsive disorder, or losing a loved one to suicide. Also, I'm a pretty terrible artist. That said, I was still able to strongly identify with her because she highlights a lot of the struggles that we feel are unique but are actually almost universal: depression, not knowing your family as well as you think you do, shame about being the only one, grief, self-doubt. Her story is one of extremes, told in nakedly candid fashion, and that honesty is powerful. I don't think I could ever be as open about the extreme parts of my life as she is in this... and then she let other people adapt it to a musical. She's a pretty incredible woman, and her work is definitely worth reading.
Not what I expected, deeper than your average retrospective illustrated memoir.
This is an autobiographical memoir graphic novel. It is sarcastically written and heartfelt. You can tell Alison has a flair for writing levity into the most sundering of situations. I had a difficult time with the time jumps and following up on the story, but overall this is an engaging read.
Interesting memoir . . . really makes you think about how children perceive their parents.
Really well done graphic memoir. Sexuality! Literature! Symbolism! Hooray!
Fun Home is an autobiographical graphic novel about growing up and discovery. In seven chapters, Bechdel digs into her childhood and teenage memories of her own life and her relationship with her dad. The result is a touching and intensely personal journey. It is also affecting in the way which she handles the discovery of her dad's homosexuality, and eventually her own. The literary approach also makes this book a truly intellectual achievement.
Ah! It may be a first! A literate graphic novelist!
I have a hard time with graphic novels in general. The text often fails to be worth reading; the story is told in the pictures.
This book is different. The story is told in the text, with pictures that complement the story.
Very compelling memoir.