A review by wardenred
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

4.5

Our selves were all we had.

From the subtitle and some of the reviews I’ve seen, I expected a more or less even mixture of heavy life stuff and dark humor. There were, however, very few pages that made me smile. For the most part the book put me in a melancholy mood and made me feel sorry for most of the people I was reading about. I did recognize the humor and vibed with it, though, even if I didn’t find it funny. What I mean is, I’ve got a bunch of stuff, like entire parts of my life, that I never talk about much because when I used to retell those parts as what I thought were fun anecdotes, it always made for awkward moments and shocked people and me slowly realizing that instead of something humorous I’ve said something really morbid. The humor in here is much like that—likely super funny if you’ve been there, but few else get to laugh—and it was really, really relatable to me.

All in all, this is a rather thorough exploration of one family’s many, many issues, with a focus on the author’s father who may or may not have committed suicide and her complicated, difficult grief for him. All the dysfunction is portrayed with a lot of compassion, and the art and prose blend very well together, though at times I did feel like the choice of words was a bit… pretentious, maybe? But it also made me pause and squint at some not-so-familiar words, and thus focus more on specific moments of the narrative, so in hindsight, I rather appreciate the effect. Altogether it made for a relatively quick yet not easy read that’s going to stick with me for some time.
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