Fun Home

After I finished reading Secondhand Time, I told myself that it was time for a break from “it’s 1939 all over again get ready for the hammer to fall” reading, and so I picked up a graphic novel. This is a complete departure for me. I really never read graphic novels or comics, but I had a Barnes and Noble gift card burning a hole in my pocket and had decided that I’d buy an actual book (I read most books on Kindle) and not a fancy notebook.(Of course, I bought a fancy notebook too, a very pretty one for only $10.) Anyway, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was sitting on a table of recent fiction, and it looked interesting and beautiful and I thought that it would look nice on my bookshelf next to Lynda Barry and Roz Chast and Jason Polan, even if I didn’t like reading it. 

But I did like reading it, very much. It took some time because when I started it, I was reading another book, and it takes twice as long to read a book when you’re reading two books at once. There is also a great deal to look at, a lot going on on each page, and you have to take your time to look at the text and the metatext and the illustrations. All of these elements work together to tell the story of Alison Bechdel’s father, who was obsessed with renovating old houses, including the house they lived in; and the rest of her family in the middle of the American century. 

Bruce Bechdel was a high school English teacher who also worked as a funeral director in his father’s funeral home, which the family nicknamed the Fun Home - hence the title, which works on many different levels. The funeral home was an oddly fun place for the Bechdel children, unlike their actual home, which was a showcase of their father’s aesthetic vision and so probably not the most homey and relaxing place to be. And Bruce Bechdel, the author’s father, lived a bit of a fun house mirror life - a respected citizen of the family’s small Pennsylvania town, he was also a closeted gay man with many secrets. 

Death is ever-present in Fun Home. The family spent a lot of time in a funeral home, a physical memento mori. And spoiler alert: Bruce Bechdel was hit by a truck and died of his injuries when Alison Bechdel was in college and just beginning to figure out the world and her place in it. His death was the dominant event of Alison Bechdel’s young adulthood, leaving many issues unresolved and many questions unanswered. 

Humans are impossibly complex, and so are human relationships, especially marriages and families. People deserve privacy; they deserve to have their little secrets, even from those closest to them. I believe that. But the secrets we keep from the people we love shouldn’t upend those people’s entire worlds when they are ultimately discovered, as secrets often are. It’s one thing not to tell your children about a wild adolescence or a disastrous early first marriage or whatever you did or didn’t do that affected you but not them. It’s quite another to have another life altogether separate and secret from that of your family, or to hide your essential identity from the people you are supposed to love and trust and who are supposed to love and trust you. 

Full disclosure - I still have a few pages to go, so I don’t yet know the whole story. But of course, neither does the author, and that’s the point. Spoiler alert 2 (you're smart, so you probably already guessed this one): Fun Home is more tragic than comic and therefor probably wasn’t the best choice for someone trying to read her way out of a doom spiral. But it is quite a beautiful book in both the visual and literary sense, and very much worth reading. And it really does look very pretty on my bookshelf.