Word: alison
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...much like a personal essay with illustrations, rather than a fully organic work of graphic literature. The author often insists on telling us about an event, with critical hindsight, in a running narration over the tops of panels that simply duplicate what you read. For example, in one scene Alison must help her father hang a mirror in her already over-decorated room. "I hate this room," she says in the panels. "When I grow up my house is going to be all metal, like a submarine." This says it all. The text, "I grew to resent...
...Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton Mifflin; 232 pages; $20) couldn't be more different from We Are On Our Own, yet it shares a focus on one parent's story. Bechdel zooms in on her enigmatic, controlling father, who, we learn early on, was an apparent suicide during the author's late teens. Now in her forties, Bechdel has gained a strong reputation for her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a long-running weekly strip currently up to its eleventh collected edition. For Fun Home, her first long-form work, Bechdel has created...
...Alison Bechdel examines her father in 'Fun Home...
...most memorable portraits of any character yet seen in this medium, Bechdel paints her father as a classic "closet case." An obsessive home decorator and control freak, he challenges any gender non-conformity he discovers in his children, for example making the young Alison, whose playground nickname is "butch," wear a barrette when she doesn't want to. He also runs the family business, a funeral home, which gives the book its snarky double-entendre title. Far from fun, thanks chiefly to the father's quashing of all affections lest the "bad" one be exposed, Bechdel compares her home life...
...demise by being run over by a truck from that same company. Gradually, as Bechdel adds so many layers of history and nuance to her father's personality he changes from Ogre to tragic casualty of self-denial. Conflating the worlds of personal history, "queer studies," and literary criticism, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home can be enjoyed as any of those, or just as a smart, insightful, funny/sad story about growing...