Fun Home

About the book Alison Bechdels pay tush Bruce was a high school English teacher, a funeral home operator, and a man who worked inexhaustibly to restore his Victorian-era home to its original glory. He was a husband and father of three children. On the outside, the Bechdels were a functional nuclear family. How eer, soon after Bechdel came out to her parents, she erudite her father was also gay and that he had sexual relationships with his students. Months after her announcement, her mother filed for divorce and two weeks after that, her father got run over by a truck. Was it an accident? Was it suicide?Bechdel theorizes it was the latter, and in Fun Home, she analyzes her memories, books, and family letters in an attempt to understand who Bruce was and wherefore he chose a life that dissatisfied him so deeply. What I same(p)d Bechdels analysis of her and her fathers lives, and her ability to wed it to distinct visuals, was inventive and involving. I remember one page in partic ular where she mapped out the places where her father was born, lived, and died, and circumscribed the area within one tidy circle to tell that all of these important things happened within one miles distance of each other.The narrative loops back and forth upon itself, and parcels out new information at a measured pace, showing the readers new facets of the akin story as it progresses. I appreciated Bechdels depth of focus in both her piece of music and her visuals nearly everything is in its right place. I admire how much effort went into writing and drawing whateverthing so emotionally painful, and how much more effort went into making it all look seamless. Summary Alison Bechdel grew up with a father who was alternatingly distant and angry, an English teacher and director of the local funeral home (or Fun Home, as Alison and her siblings called it).Their relationship grew more and more complex until Alison was in college. Shortly after Alison had come out to her parents, s he learned that her father was also gay but before she had more than a brief chance to butt against that news, he was dead. Whether the accident that killed him had been truly an accident or a suicide, Alison would never know, just one of the numerous mysteries left by her father for Alison to slowly and painfully unravel here. ReviewThe look at my afflictive childhood flavor of memoir is my least favorite flavor, and is responsible for me thinking I didnt like memoirs in general until relatively recently. Ill happily grant Fun Home an exception, however, flush though it technically does fall into that category. There are several reasons that it sets itself apart from the rest of its peers, but I think the primary reason is that Bechdel is non using her the trauma of childhood for laughs (although at that place are some mirthful touches throughout) or for dramatic potential (although theres certainly plenty of that as well).Instead, theres a very palpable sense that shes writ ing this memoir because shes really laborious to figure out her relationship with her father, and what it meant, and that putting her memories down on paper is the best way she force out hope to defecate sense of it all. The narrative flow does jump backwards and forwards through time, restate some parts of the story from different angles as they come to bear on different topics, free it a feeling of thinking out loud, but even so, it doesnt come across as feeling scattered or unpolished.It also helps that her analysis, both of her father and of herself, is extremely penetrating, with enough emotion to make it powerful but enough age and maturity to make it thoughtful. Bechdels prose is similarly both gilded and immediate, verbose and vocabulary-ridden, but still clear and forceful. The book is rife with literary allusions and direct textual comparisons, some of which I got, some of which surely went over my head, but which certainly set the intellectual tone of the book.Bechd els art is also great, and I really liked the juxtaposition of her own detailed drawings with the drawn upbringing of filmgraphs, printed text, and her own diary entries. Overall, this was a very thoughtful and penetrating book. Im sure that there are layers of meaning about homosexuality and the process of coming out that I, as a straightforward person, didnt latch on to. But I think theres also a message thats applicable to everyone, about the secrets that our parents keep, and about who they really are, and how we, as children of our parents, can manifest those secrets without ever truly understanding them. out of 5 stars.Summary The entire story is present from the first few pages, in the antique decadence that contrasts peculiarly against father Bruces strict, volatile perimeters his cut-off jean shorts his nose stuck in The Nude by Kenneth Clark and in Alisons tomboyish supplication as a child for his affection, channeled or else into the houses restoration, a House of Ush er in reverse. It was his passion. And I do mean passion. Libidinal. Manic. Martyred, writes Bechdel, showing Bruce carrying a porch column bent over his back, wearing only shorts that would make the Village flock blush.After Alison types and mails a letter from college telling her parents she is gay, her mother informs her that Bruce, a high school English teacher and underemployed funeral home director, had been with men throughout their marriage. The first had been a farmhand at 14 one was even her babysitter, Roy. I had imagined my confession as an emancipation from my parents, but instead I was pulled back into their orbit wherefore had I told them? I hadnt even had sex with anyone yet. Conversely, my father had been having sex with men for years and not telling anyone. Four months later, Bruce died in puzzling (read suicidal) conditions. Alison impulsively links his death to her sexual revelation the send away of his life coincided with the beginning of my right. Bechde l traces the fear of this correlation back and forth in time through bizarre, coded interactions with her parents. honoring her narrate cyclonically around this traumatic core a sort of inverted Oedipal complex, the assertion of her erotic truth destroying her repressed fathers life is a devastating, bittersweet head-trip.It is the reading equivalent of a photo mosaic hundreds of tiny images of Alison forming an inescapably dominating image of Bruce. Fun Home also pulls off a portrait of how the invisible histories and private lives of parents impress unwittingly upon children emotionally and psychologically. Plenty of books attempt that, but less pull it off without connect-the-dots associations or posturing, fewer still with Fun Houses effortless chisel of past, present and future.