Scan barcode
A review by rsmry
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Sooooo well written wow! Very clever in how she layered anecdotes and wove together stories. Really enjoyed the style of her drawings as well, with the washes in different saturations. The reflections on her identity, her father's identity, her relationship with him, and how their sexualities changed their relationships with gender were incredibly well written. The whole narrative has a reflective and often nostalgic quality that I connected with despite not sharing many similarities with Bechdel or her family. I guess it's more like relating to the way her thoughts flow? Or maybe she just did a good job capturing the feeling of reflecting on one's childhood. Idk.
One criticism I have is that she never explicitly called her father a pedophile. I know a lot of things, like his abuse of his family members, is explicit in the drawings but less severe sounding in the text, and it's a great writing tool to show the audience the reality of her childhood while talking around the issue in text, emphasizing her inherited struggle in talking to/about her family. But in the context of a society that ignores/dismisses pedophilia a little too often, I think being explicit about using a word we find so repulsive and connecting it to his actions is important.
And one specific note: on page 108 she kind of sets up two options for herself had she been part of her father's generation -- "Would I have had the guts to be one of those Eisenhower-era butches? Or would I have married and sought succor from my high school students?"
Though phrasing it like these were her two options makes sense given that the novel is reflecting on and drawing comparisons between her and her father's lives, this felt jarring when I read it because it considers pedophilia so casually, and the either/or phrasing of those two panels poses these hypotheticals as the only two options. I'm uncomfortable with how this associates closeted homosexuality with pedophilia given the history of homophobes painting queer people as sexually perverse people who prey on children.
Although pedophilia is a weighty topic, I think these are relatively small criticisms -- like, she definitely doesn't paint her father's actions in a good light. Overall she covered complicated topics and complicated relationships really well.
One criticism I have is that she never explicitly called her father a pedophile. I know a lot of things, like his abuse of his family members, is explicit in the drawings but less severe sounding in the text, and it's a great writing tool to show the audience the reality of her childhood while talking around the issue in text, emphasizing her inherited struggle in talking to/about her family. But in the context of a society that ignores/dismisses pedophilia a little too often, I think being explicit about using a word we find so repulsive and connecting it to his actions is important.
And one specific note: on page 108 she kind of sets up two options for herself had she been part of her father's generation -- "Would I have had the guts to be one of those Eisenhower-era butches? Or would I have married and sought succor from my high school students?"
Though phrasing it like these were her two options makes sense given that the novel is reflecting on and drawing comparisons between her and her father's lives, this felt jarring when I read it because it considers pedophilia so casually, and the either/or phrasing of those two panels poses these hypotheticals as the only two options. I'm uncomfortable with how this associates closeted homosexuality with pedophilia given the history of homophobes painting queer people as sexually perverse people who prey on children.
Although pedophilia is a weighty topic, I think these are relatively small criticisms -- like, she definitely doesn't paint her father's actions in a good light. Overall she covered complicated topics and complicated relationships really well.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Pedophilia, Child abuse, and Domestic abuse