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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy
by Alison Bechdel
Houghton Mifflin
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Books are hardly ever perfect. How could they be? They are written with a unique vision, edited with an eye on the broadest audience, and then vetted to ensure they make money. It's a wonder there are any good books at all.

But whatever the process was for Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy (and you can bet that a lesbian memoir told in the form of a graphic novel to be sold at suburban Barnes & Nobles was a challenge for the sales team), it is a perfect book: smart, intense, and provocative.

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Most readers know Alison Bechdel though her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, and the nine volumes of her collected strips. Bechdel's Dykes was a superb blend of humor, soap-opera, and political commentary. While she always predicates the humor and the emotional content of these strips on recognizable human conditions, she never makes the mistake of making them "universal." Each of the Dykes to Watch Out For strips work so well because Bechdel has rooted them in the specifics and the minutia of lesbian culture. And not just general lesbian culture, but a specific thirty-something to fifty-something, feminist influenced, counter cultural, post-hippie, politicized, not really mainstream, lesbian culture. Her characters chat about political issues as easily as they complain about their love lives (of lack of them) and the everyday issues of race and money and social power come up-- as they usually do-- as everyday conversations, not Issues. If one had to explain the concept of late 20th century "lesbian community"-- or "gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community" (because as in life these dykes are wide circles of friends) to someone in the year 2764, you could not do better then showing them Bechdel's comics.

It is difficult to believe that Dykes to Watch Out For began in 1986-- two full decades ago-- because the early strips are as fresh as ever. But it is clear that it was Bechdel's training ground. All of the visual quickness and emotional nuance she put in those strips appears tenfold in her graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy. While graphic novels are called "novels," even at their best-- like Ghost World-- they come cross more as slightly complicated short stories, or novellas. Using illustrations to tell a layered narrative that has emotional and cultural resonance is hard; most writers are not up to it. In Fun Home Bechdel never misses a beat. She has created a narrative that is as good as any stellar literary novel today.

Fun Home tells the story of Bechdel and her family. Tolstoy wrote that "Every happy family is alike, and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," but the Bechdels are often unhappy and happy, different and alike in a variety of ways that feel vibrantly real and emotionally precise. The book begins with Alison growing up in the 1960s in the ornate home that her family owns (the family also runs the local funeral home-- the fun home). Bruce, her father, decorates everything, demands perfection, and is mostly impossible, if loving. His artistic bent was somewhat sinister-- "he used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear what they were not." This is especially true when he is demanding that tomboy Alison dress like a cute little girl or making their home look alarming like the Addams Family manse. It is not a surprise then that after Alison comes out in college, she is informed by her mother that her father is a closeted homosexual. So, Alison (the butch dyke) and her father (the effeminate man) share a passion for things that are masculine: she in wanting to look like a teenaged boy, he wanting to love and have sex with them. (As Bechdel notes: "He would cultivate these young men like orchids.")

But-- in case you haven't figured it out-- Fun Home is not a happy, cross-generational, gay-positive story of queer daughter and father. Most of the memoir concerns Alison understanding her father's suicide that occurred when she was twenty-- just weeks after she had come out to her parents. Bechdel builds her narrative around the notions of loss and time-- Proust's The Remembrance of Things Past floats through the text. Bechdel's wedding of word and image has a beautiful specificity to it: you can't imagine one existing with out the other in this completely imagined, articulated world.

Like Proust's work, Fun Home is about time and remembering, but it is also about salvation. Bruce Bechdel is trapped in his time and lives a life in which sex is furtive and the truth of desire is transformed into artifice. But circling her father-- his distorted, or maybe undistorted, mirror image is Alison Bechdel living in her more open time, transforming sex and truth not into ephemeral artifice, but art.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com