Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
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Web ID: 14376841Honest, Heartfelt, and Interesting
Alison Bechdel is one of those authors who have the extraordinary capability of taking the mundane and melancholy aspects of everyday life and turning them into a beautifully constructed narrative piece of loss, love, and self-discovery. I am usually not the type of person to pick up memoirs, but Fun Home was truly a genuine, yet gritty, window into someone’s life as they try to navigate the world during the mid-late 21st century as a lesbian coming to terms with her identity. Alongside queerness, the book also covers the author’s complicated relationship with her father and his subsequent death. There were points where I did not always agree with the author’s point of view, however, I also felt that it didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the book because of how earnestly it reflected the human experience. One thing that stood out to me about this book was that it didn’t seem to be written for anyone but the author herself. Throughout my reading, it became evident that she was trying to make sense of her father’s death, a tragic accident on the surface, into something that she could understand or make larger of, which is something, I think, we can all relate to. Losing a close family member is a devastating thing to experience and can affect different people in different ways. However, I honestly did not expect Alison’s initial reaction to her father’s passing, but the more I read and thought about it, the more it made sense to me. Her family ran a funeral home (or “fun” home, as the title may suggest), so she grew up in an environment where death didn’t carry as much weight as it would in another household and could even be comical at times, so it must have been really strange for it to actually happen to someone close to her. I also want to highlight how I could not put this book down. It was a pleasant surprise, too. Because the story is driven by reflection and contemplation rather than a concrete central plot, I definitely thought I would enjoy it, but I didn’t think I would be so hooked on it as I was. Yet, through a combination of wit, interesting anecdotes, and the charm of its comic style, I had to pry it out of my own hands sometimes. I enjoyed the decision to have the story alternate between Alison as a young child living with her father and Alison as a young adult in college when she lost her father because it emphasized how the mistakes her father made when she was younger affected her decisions when she got older. It was also intriguing to see how she and her father, polar opposites on the surface, had the same admiration for fashion, masculinity, and literature. They were like two sides of the same coin. Fun Home has been one of my favorite books I have read in the past couple of months and I look forward to checking out other works by the author.
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
One of the Best
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is one of the best memoirs I have ever read. She carefully examines the ambivalent and inextricable but unacknowledged connection she felt to her father (as well as her mother, yet in a more limited way)—a connection that did not become clear to her until she left home to attend college. Alison and her father, both highly intellectual and complex individuals, often used proxies to communicate and know each other. For example, their discussions about literature allowed them to subtly share their thoughts and feelings within clear boundaries. This coded communication reflects the deconstruction of her father’s character that constitutes the bulk of this memoir. Another aspect that distinguishes Fun Home from most other memoirs is Bechdel’s focus on her father—this text is equal parts autobiography and biography, just as it is equal parts visual and verbal. The blend of media and genre signifies Bechdel’s own difficulty in asserting her identity as separate from her father’s. As much as she wants to claim her individuality, she cannot escape her constant need to identify with her father. As much as she wants to relate her story through images, she cannot escape the need to use words, frequently conflating the two media by using images of words. I’m pretty sure I will need to reread this book at some point—its richness and complexity cannot be fully measured after just one reading. Highly recommended.
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com