Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This graphic memoir is in some ways captivating and in other ways a bit off mark for me. It's definitely strange, which leans in its favor. The story is as much about Bechdel's father, and the fact that he was a gay man who was not out, as it is about Bechdel.

It's different from other graphic novels, because there's almost a sentence or more before every single panel that's helping to tell the story. Sometimes those sentences are fun, interesting, or extremely helpful to the story. Other times, they are a bit tiresome and disruptive to the flow.

My biggest struggle was that a few really big issues were explained away so quickly or briefly, that it left me feeling unsatisfied with those conclusions. There's definitely some gaps here, which probably comes from her having viewed her childhood with a child's eyes, which is understandable. I just wish that as an adult she could have come back and filled in a few of those gaps for us.

There are some strong ties to literature that walk that fine line between characterization and pretension. I like books and literature a lot, so I found it interesting most of the time and tedious only sometimes. Since her family was a family or artists and English teachers, I think explaining her story in those frames definitely made sense. It's just not something that's going to click for everyone.

Honestly, it does speak a lot to who Bechdel is and how she see's herself, in a round about sort of way. I especially enjoyed the artwork, and it was very easy to identify the characters from multiple angles, which I have recently learned is incredibly important to my ability to take in and truly enjoy a graphic novel.

Overall, I enjoyed this read. It wasn't what I expected, and it wander down some paths that weren't all of interest to me. The idea of including excerpts from real letters was interesting, though often difficult to read. There was basically no character development on the other siblings, which might have been a nice edition, since this focused so much on her family and childhood.

Book 81 read in 2018

Pages: 232