Having never felt much inclination toward the graphic novel genre, I accepted a copy of Fun Home by Alison Bechdel on loan only because a coworker promised that I could finish it in one hour and forty minutes--almost precisely the amount of time it would take to travel from Muncie to my hometown, where I was being driven for the weekend.
One hour and fifty-five minutes later, when my dad pulled the car into the driveway, I was close to the end, but not there yet. I realized that Fun Home is a book that demands patient, meticulous study. I examined every illustration, looking for the visual details that Bechdel, a cartoonist, tucked in. Hidden like easter eggs, there are amusing details meant to be discovered on particularly grim pages. Bechdel can also make the most simplistic details, such as Road Runner on the TV, period cars, recurring appearances of the Sun Beam Bread logo, etc., realistic, melancholy and heartrending all at once.
The misery and the humor of the characters, the events and the time period must be thoughtfully digested. The book is divided into seven chapters, each based on a different theme in the author's childhood and young adult life. Each one on its own could be a personal essay about overcoming an unusual hardship, but the episodes are tied together by recurring moments - the scene in which Bechdel learns her father's deepest, darkest secret over the phone; the stack of literature on homosexuality that grows and grows on her nightstand in college; her father writing letters to her mother from his bunk during the war - and references to classic literature, such as Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, that are carefully, artfully implemented and never daunting.
As a memoir, Fun Home is beautifully arranged and as honest and unapologetic as they come. Bechdel writes and draws as if she is still putting together the pieces as she does so, and closes the book with the impression that the story is not over. Which of course, it is not, since the author, her two brothers, and their mother, all survive the father they never had and then lost. Fun Home illustrates the fact that we never truly escape the legacies of our parents and never completely outgrow our childhood experiences. Bechdel wrote a note in the Advance Readers Edition, which I read, in which she reveals that "the actual documentary truth [as recorded in diaries, letters, clippings and photographs from her childhood] was almost always richer and more surprising than the way [she] had remembered a particular event." In Fun Home, Bechdel does not just explore the far reaches of her memory. She revisits it as if seeing it all happen again, literally, graphically, for the first time.
