Alison Bechdel is perhaps best known for the Bechdel Test, a measure of representation of women in media. (For those who don’t know, the test asks whether a particular work features more than one woman, whether those women have a conversation with one another, and whether that conversation centers around a topic other than a man.) But Alison Bechdel is also a cartoonist who created a long-running cartoon strip and two graphic novel memoirs. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was her first graphic memoir, and covered her adolescence and young adulthood through the lens of her father’s suicide.
Bechdel grew up in her father’s hometown of Beech Creek, PA, where he was both a high school English teacher and the director of the funeral home. (The titular “Fun Home”.) Death and literature therefore feature heavily throughout Bechdel’s life and the book. The memoir discusses her complex relationship with her father, the crumbling relationship between her mother and her father, his closeted homosexuality (or perhaps bisexuality), her own coming out story, and more. It goes back and forth in time, relating anecdotes from her young adulthood and tying them back to occurrences from when she was young. Her father is painted as both sympathetic and monstrous, an emotionally distant man who demanded perfection in all things, but then tried desperately to relate to his daughter through their shared love of literature.
Fun Home is a very cerebral book. Bechdel goes over a lot of philosophical theory as she thinks about her father and their relationship, and what his life could have been were he not closeted. She also wonders whether her own coming out had an impact on his death, which while not ruled a suicide, seemingly was. There are numerous literary and mythological references throughout that tie back in to the anecdotes and Bechdel’s thoughts about herself and her family. Fun Home is thoughtful, occasionally funny, and often depressing.