You can read Fun Home in a single afternoon. That is not as difficult as you might think; Fun Home contains more pictures than words. If you sprint through the book, however, it will be a mistake. Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir packs so much into few pages that the reader could (and should) spend days or even weeks unpacking all the layers of meaning in her text.
Our society tends to relegate graphic novels to teenagers. We interchange the words “graphic novel” with “comic book” and imagine brightly colored superheroes saving damsels in distress from evil villains. We believe that books with pictures don’t have great literary value. We are wrong, and Fun Home proves that. It demands that we spend time with it, carefully constructing meaning from the clues the words and drawings together provide.
Alison Bechdel weaves together incidents from her life to create a narrative about coming to terms with her father’s death. In doing so, she also explores her own sexuality, her father’s sexuality, and their relationship as father and daughter, amid a multitude of references to a huge range of literature, especially Modernist works. Despite covering such a wide range of topics, her writing is restrained. The book seems deceptively simple. Bechdel is a great storyteller who has created a page-turner. Fun Home has compelling narrative, and much of the meaning in the story is below its surface. It has to be pulled out from reading the pictures and the text together, picking at potential symbols, and googling your way through Modernist writers.
Towards the end of Fun Home, Bechdel describes the events of the semester during which she realized she is a lesbian and then came out to her parents. This section is one great example of Bechdel’s style throughout the entirety of her memoir. It begins by describing her successful attempt to beg her way into a course for winter term after she had neglected to choose one until the last second. The course was on James Joyce’s Ulysses, which happened to be her father’s favorite book. She likens the experience to Athena sending Telemachus to find Odysseus. On the same afternoon, she enters a bookstore and realizes that she is a lesbian. She depicts herself browsing a copy of Word is Out, a book telling the stories of homosexual men and women, at the moment of her revelation. When she tells her father that she will be taking the Ulysses course, he is elated, and they have a short moment of bonding. She does not come out to him at this time, however, and when she does the bonding is lost. This section of the book is replete with references to the Odyssey. She uses the references to compare her own journey through learning about her sexuality with the ancient epic like Joyce creates parallels between Ulysses and the Odyssey, creating intricate layers of cross referenced works to add meaning to her story that the reader has to work to understand.
Fun Home is a beautiful and important book. By choosing to use the graphic novel as her platform for sharing her experiences as a young lesbian and as an eventually openly lesbian woman trying to understand her relationship with her mostly closeted gay father after his death, she is forcing readers to reevaluate their understanding of what a graphic novel can and should be. By pushing the boundary of the type of story that can be told with pictures and forcing readers to confront their beliefs about what constitutes a work of literary value, Alison Bechdel has created a work that is important both as a graphic novel and as a piece of queer literature. When you add Fun Home to your reading list, make sure to take your time with the story. Fun Home absolutely
