Word: bechdel
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...popularity of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, a two-volume remembrance of growing up in post-revolution Iran. We Are On Our Own by Miriam Katin recalls the author's early childhood living secretly as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Hungary. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel takes place in suburban Pennsylvania, where the author's father led a secret double life. Though wildly divergent in setting, tone and approach, both books share a compelling interest in the consequences of a stressful childhood...
...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...
...When Bechdel quickly reveals both her father's premature death and that he led a secret life as a deeply closeted, shame-filled gay man, it comes as a shock. What author would give away both a natural narrative climax and the key to a person's mystery right at the beginning of the book? The answer is: the kind of author not interested in easy drama and simplistic explanations. In a series of chapters that more or less follow Bechdel from young childhood until her college years, the book traces her father's story...
...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...