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

emotional reflective sad slow-paced

4.25

Quick takeaways:

Protagonist(s): Complex

Antagonist(s): Society and time periods

Plot: Heavy

Writing: Deep

Overall: B+

Thoughts:

I went into this book thinking it was going to be similar to another comic-form memoir, Genderqueer (one of my favorite books ever). I figured it was going to touch on themes of sexual identity discovery similar to Genderqueer but didn’t realize how deep it was going to go.

The memoir is about Allison and her father’s sexuality and who they were/are as people. We watch Allison discover her sexuality while she tries to understand her father, a closeted gay man. I don’t want to get into spoilers but you learn so much about this man and it leaves you feeling so many ways about him: anger, empathy, pity, confusion.

I usually plough through comics and graphic novels and I admit I was expecting this to be a quick read but this is a slow and challenging book. Allison’s writing is very heavy in terms of subject and word usage. The artwork is simple since the focus is Allison’s story telling and I feel it makes it an easier reading than if she wrote a text only memoir (bias here as I’m not the biggest memoir person).

It felt inaccessible at times language wise but I think that’s because I have been living in the YA sphere for a bit (And it feeling inaccessible is not a bad thing! You should be challenged when reading sometimes}. Going back to my earlier comparison to Genderqueer, I think that book is more for high school age and above while Fun Home is more for college age and above (in general). Either way, I think both books should be required queer reading.