Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic Alison Bechdel (Houghton Mifflin)
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When Fun Home begins Bechdel’s father is a high school English teacher, part-time mortician, and closeted homosexual. A perfectionist who treats “his furniture like children and his children like furniture,” he’s like a cross between Joan Crawford (the Mommie Dearest version) and Jane Wyman’s miserable homemaker in All That Heaven Allows, two queer icons he would probably fail to recognize. And for a while the work threatens to become a graphic version of Augusten Burroughs’s Running With Scissors, with Bechdel and her brothers at the mercy of an unstable adult and his whims. But Bechdel’s scrupulous fairness sets her a cut above many current memoirists (and her obsessive reliance on fact guarantees she won’t be grilled on Oprah anytime soon). When her father isn’t flying into a rage over the condition of the family’s curtains, he’s witty, supportive, and occasionally revealing about his true nature. Of course, to the modern queer eye, his cutoff shorts and velvet suits reveal a lot more than the Bechdel children have the capacity to understand.
It spoils nothing to disclose that Bechdel’s father died–a possible suicide–at 44, the same age as his beloved F. Scott Fitzgerald. But while Fitzgerald succumbed to heart attacks and alcoholism, Bechdel believes her father jumped in front of a truck (an incident that was officially labeled an accident). She attributes his despair chiefly to her mother’s having asked him for a divorce, though Bechdel wonders if her own announcement that she was gay factored into his decision.
Sometimes, in fact, it’s a little too detailed. Fun Home stumbles near its conclusion, when Bechdel widens her scope to include her first lesbian relationship, her mother’s failed ambitions, and a college course on Ulysses. While it’s funny to see her new lover read James and the Giant Peach as an ode to cunnilingus, scenes like this seriously slow the momentum. And though she tries to incorporate then-current events like Watergate, she fails to do so in any meaningful way–which is disappointing considering how effortlessly she weaves politics into Dykes.
Where: Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark
