Review - Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” received the sort of accolades that graphic novels usually don’t see. Every once in a while something like “Maus” or “Persepolis” comes along that captures the attention of the open-minded among the literati, and Bechdel’s work certainly deserves its place among that echelon. It was a book of the year choice in Time, Entertainment Weekly, People, USA Today, the New York Times and loads of others and this is especially significant due to the subject matter and the way Bechdel uses the possibilities of the medium to their fullest potential.
The book is a memoir of Bechdel’s relationship with her father, Bruce, and both the bond and distance between the two, most likely created through two aspects in which they were very much alike — a penchant for the literary and being gay. Bruce Bechdel, having come of age in the 1950s, kept his sexuality a secret and he moved through life as so many did, following the path of the world and resigning himself to that way. As Bechdel discovered right before her father’s death and even more so after, he couldn’t help being himself, and the path of reconstruction — through his life, both secret and public, through his literary obsessions and creative expression — becomes a way for Bechdel to provide a counter narrative for her own life, to widen the local map to a regional one.
Bechdel wraps her investigation around the literary interests of her father — at the time of his death, he was reading Camus’ “ A Happy Death” — and illustrates not only how literature acts as counterpoint to our own obsessions and decisions, but how so much alike a human being and literature can be. There are little bits that beg interpretation but don’t always settle in on one meaning, that sometimes reflect the interpreter. Bechdel’s memoir is, in this way, a spin through many classics — “The Odyssey,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Ulysses” — that can serve as guidebooks to her relationship as well as points of reference to help her read between the lines of her relationship with her father. In the works of Colette, Bechdel traces an actual and sensual shared document of exploration between the father and daughter, as if he is giving her a message to not make the same mistake that he was forced into — to follow her muse, whether it be artistic or sexual.
Bruce Bechdel was not able to follow either. Not only was his homosexuality repressed — perhaps he was bisexual, but, either way, the stifling of his same-sex urges created a barrier to self-discovery — but he was also called back to his own town as a young man to take over the family business — he was a mortician — and put the kibosh on his own journey. It’s a depressing bit of symbolism to be called back home to spend your eternity patching up the dead, putting an upbeat face on people’s grief. Bruce Bechdel, it seems from the book, had a much harder time painting a grin on his own.
At the same time, Bechdel traces her own history of self-expression through journaling, comparing it to her father’s letters. In context of this literate memoir, Bechdel is really making the connections between the joy and art of personal communication and the books we look to as our ideal of the same. Her father’s letters are eloquent and wear his literary loves on his sleeve — Bechdel’s journals are primitive and clunky, but she traces the journey of her scribing from the innocuous to the points where styles and nuances begin to enter.
Bechdel’s memoir is powerful enough when taken as an examination of gay identity and the repression that society once doled out as the immediate answer to personal feelings for the same sex, but that’s so limiting in scope. It’s investigation of artistic expression aside, Bechdel’s work is also an examination of the personal nature of creativity, of how intimate details and thoughts transform into a communication with an audience of readers and stopping self-expression is a kind of murder in itself.
Despite its extreme personal and honest nature, “Fun Home” is also a memoir for us all, in that everyone spends time examining their parent as they would a novel and attempting to extract the personal meaning with each passage, a biological version of that intellectual give and take. There is a little bit of yourself in that person, there is something to be gleaned about yourself in reading that person with understanding. There are also mounds of mystery to be sifted through, miles of unknown territory that speak to one of the most base instincts of all human nature — to understand.
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