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A review by steveatwaywords
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
challenging
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.5
When Bechdel's graphic memoir tips its hand around its major secret in the first chapter, I wondered how she would spend the next six. She does not disappoint.
As she reflects on memories uncertain, limited omniscience, her own growing identity and how it biases her narrative agenda, challenges nostalgia and resolves/fails-to-resolve relationships (including with herself), and entangles all of it in thick and layered parallels to the literature she knows and will know, we find that Fun Home is about something far richer and more important than its mere family plot.
This is worth the read to settle in to: I appreciated the genre which comes from her own growing artistic skill, her takes on her readings, and how polarizing ideologies somehow might fuse in unlikely places. The only reason I do not give it 5 stars is that once met, I wishes to stay there longer, that references to other complications and nuance might have been explored still more. She is certainly capable of doing it.
As she reflects on memories uncertain, limited omniscience, her own growing identity and how it biases her narrative agenda, challenges nostalgia and resolves/fails-to-resolve relationships (including with herself), and entangles all of it in thick and layered parallels to the literature she knows and will know, we find that Fun Home is about something far richer and more important than its mere family plot.
This is worth the read to settle in to: I appreciated the genre which comes from her own growing artistic skill, her takes on her readings, and how polarizing ideologies somehow might fuse in unlikely places. The only reason I do not give it 5 stars is that once met, I wishes to stay there longer, that references to other complications and nuance might have been explored still more. She is certainly capable of doing it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death of parent, Suicide, and Grief
Moderate: Homophobia and Sexual content
Minor: Adult/minor relationship, Mental illness, and Infidelity
Illustrations of sexual situations are at times fairly graphic. Otherwise, the content warnings are verbal reckonings in memory; nearly all propel the major plot of the memoir.