Fun Home A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

​     This book has become iconic in both comic and memoir circles and for a good reason. It’s a terrific accomplishment in both fields. I’m not even really into memoirs and I can appreciate this.
     Bechdel has made a career out of getting up close and personal with her readers and, though on a personal level that sort of dirty laundry airing terrifies me, as a reader I can appreciate it, in a very voyeuristic sort of way.
     I was prepared for this book. Not only have I read Bechdel’s most recent biocomic about her lifelong obsession with fitness, but actually I saw the musical adaptation of this a while back. And yes, the fact that someone read this book and then thought, you know what, this would make a great musical, absolutely boggles my mind, but the thing is I didn’t even like the musical all that much. It felt kind of forced, like it wasn’t a story that needed to be sung. And sure enough, upon reading the actual book my conviction stands.
     The thing is, as much as I don’t like the public indiscretion of look at me genre that memoirs tend to be, some lives just naturally land themselves to that sort of exposure, if only as a therapy to the people who lived them, which might very well be the case here.
      There was no fun in Bechdels, though the title also plays on the abbreviation of the fact that the family operated a funeral business, it’s clever like that. Bechdel grew up with a downright repugnant father and an at best withholding mother, two people who had no business being together, let alone bring three kids into the world.
     The main theme here is that the father was a closeted gay, a thoroughly provincial man of airs and pretentions and predilections for teenage boys. The duality of his nature, the pressure of living with the secret, the balancing of his two selves might be to blame for how crappy of a father and of a person he was or maybe he just was that way and didn’t need the excuses.
     At 44 he walked out in front of a truck and was killed, either careless or suicide. Either way, his family survived him, his children survived him and one of them went on to write about it, over and over and over again. As if exorcising her demons. A childhood that messed up would scar anyone, even the (arguably more resilient) older generations.
     The book is stunningly well written, terrifically drawn and completely (terrifyingly) immersive. It’s so wild and so well observed as to almost be fictional and you’ll have to remind yourself that no, this was someone’s life. You know that Tolstoy’s thing about all unhappy families being different, well, this is a portrait of a very different unhappy family and it merits attention. Bleak, absolutely, but then again what did you expect? Fun?
      Very good read. Recommended.