Reading: Fun Home
Aug. 24th, 2019 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartFun Home is a memoir by Alison Bechdel (yes, Alison Bechdel of the Bechdel-Wallace Test) in the form of a graphic novel. I picked up a copy in the Turl Street Oxfam bookshop a while ago, where it was shelved under SF because the Turl Street Oxfam bookshop clearly can't get their heads around the concept of non-SF graphic novels (I found Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis there under SF as well) and picked it up today mostly because I am trying to reduce the size of the physical TBR pile a bit before I go on holiday taking only my Kindle, and I knew it would be a quick read.
It's a story of an odd, slightly gothic childhood in smalltown Pennsylvania - the "fun home" of the title is actually funeral home that is the family business, and as a small child Bechdel identifies her family with the Addams Family - but it's mostly the story of Bechdel's relationship with her father, who died in what may have been an accident and may have been suicide in 1980, when she was twenty, a few months after her coming out to her parents had prompted her mother to tell her about her father's string of affairs with other men (often the teenage boys from his high school classes who he hired as babysitters and to help in the garden). Rather than being told chronologically, each chapter looks at Bechdel's early life from a slightly different angle, sometimes returning to the same events more than once. It's full of literary references, which seems appropriate given that her father was a high-school English teacher as well as directing a funeral home, and books were a key point of connection between father and daughter. It's clever, interesting and equal parts sad and funny, while Bechdel's drawings complement her text perfectly; I liked it a lot.
It's a story of an odd, slightly gothic childhood in smalltown Pennsylvania - the "fun home" of the title is actually funeral home that is the family business, and as a small child Bechdel identifies her family with the Addams Family - but it's mostly the story of Bechdel's relationship with her father, who died in what may have been an accident and may have been suicide in 1980, when she was twenty, a few months after her coming out to her parents had prompted her mother to tell her about her father's string of affairs with other men (often the teenage boys from his high school classes who he hired as babysitters and to help in the garden). Rather than being told chronologically, each chapter looks at Bechdel's early life from a slightly different angle, sometimes returning to the same events more than once. It's full of literary references, which seems appropriate given that her father was a high-school English teacher as well as directing a funeral home, and books were a key point of connection between father and daughter. It's clever, interesting and equal parts sad and funny, while Bechdel's drawings complement her text perfectly; I liked it a lot.
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Date: 2019-08-31 10:50 pm (UTC)*eyeroll* Could be worse tho - I've seen extremely non-kid-friendly stuff in the kids' section of WHSmith more than once cos of Not Getting It about certain genres.
Thanks for the rec! I didn't know the 'different angle' thing. I should really read it - the musical made me cry absolute buckets.