seebrandyread 's review for:

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

4.5

challenging dark emotional funny reflective sad tense

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Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a classic graphic memoir chronicling her coming of age with a volatile, closeted father and her discovery of her own gender and sexual identities. She draws connections and parallels between their journeys using classic literature, a subject they both loved, and, despite their commonalities, their lives take very different routes, one of which leads to tragedy. The memoir begins and ends with the myth of Daedalus and Icarus. There are similarities with Bechdel and her own father from the father/child relationship to the tragic death. Of course, it’s not a perfect metaphor because Bechdel’s father is both Daedalus and Icarus at different points. It’s through these myths and archetypes, through a love of literature she and her father shared, that Bechdel searches for understanding of her father, their relationship, and herself. She never understands just how complicated he is until after his death when her mother reveals some of the harder truths about his life. Because so much of Bechdel’s story revolves around the written word, there’s a rich intertextuality in her memoir which includes excerpts from her diary, her father's letters, and other books that impacted her. They’re there almost as evidence of her memories, and what is a memoir but preservation of one’s memories?