Fun home

Not what I expected, deeper than your average retrospective illustrated memoir.

3.5 stars.

Although we share an alma mater, Alison Bechdel is sufficiently older than me that when I first heard of her, she was already a realtively famous sensation, with a popular webcomic, which was soon to be followed by an eponymous test that would be cited in every feminist movie review for the rest of time. So, thinking about her as an unassuming child, forced into girly clothing was a little odd.

Usually, memoir (especially graphic memoir) is form over substance, as no one's real life is actually very interesting, but Bechdel's childhood may be an exception to that rule. Her early years are dominated by a gothic house, kept to exacting detail; a mortuary that seems to resurface in the narrative at particularly apropos moments and a relationship with her father that is largely dominated by F. Scott Fitzgerald allusions.

Bechdel drops hints along the way that she is not the most reliable of narrators, and I found that although Fun Home is ostensibly about her dad, it's mostly about how Alison Bechdel cast him as a foil in her own life, and then uses that to reinterpret her own.