Fun Home

About the book Alison Bechdels father Bruce was a high educate face teacher, a funeral billet operator, and a man who worked tirelessly to restore his Victorian-era home to its original glory. He was a husband and father of three infantren. On the outside, the Bechdels were a operating(a) nuclear family. However, soon later on Bechdel came out to her parents, she learned her father was in any case gay and that he had trip outual relationships with his students. Months after her announcement, her mother filed for divorce and dickens weeks after that, her father got run over by a truck. Was it an chance event? Was it suicide?Bechdel withdraws it was the latter, and in Fun Home, she analyzes her memories, books, and family letters in an tone-beginning to generalise who Bruce was and why he chose a life that dissatisfied him so deeply. What I liked Bechdels analysis of her and her fathers lives, and her ability to embrace it to distinct visuals, was inventive and involving. I remember virtuoso p maturate in particular where she mapped out the places where her father was born, lived, and died, and circumscribed the area within atomic number 53 tidy circle to reveal that solely of these important things happened within one miles distance of each other.The narrative loops stern and forrard upon itself, and parcels out new information at a measured pace, demonstrate the readers new facets of the same story as it progresses. I appreciated Bechdels depth of focus in both her writing and her visuals nearly everything is in its right place. I admire how much effort went into writing and displace something so emotionally painful, and how much more effort went into making it all look seamless. Summary Alison Bechdel grew up with a father who was alternatingly distant and angry, an English teacher and beamor of the local funeral home (or Fun Home, as Alison and her siblings called it).Their relationship grew more and more complex until Alison was in coll ege. Shortly after Alison had spot out to her parents, she learned that her father was as well as gay hardly before she had more than a brief chance to process that news, he was dead. Whether the accident that killed him had been rightfully an accident or a suicide, Alison would never know, dear one of the many mysteries left by her father for Alison to slowly and distressingly unravel here. ReviewThe look at my terrible childhood purport of memoir is my least favorite flavor, and is responsible for me idea I didnt like memoirs in general until relatively recently. Ill happily succumb Fun Home an exception, however, even though it technically does fall into that category. thither are several reasons that it sets itself apart from the rest of its peers, and I think the primary reason is that Bechdel is not using her the trauma of childhood for laughs (although thither are some humorous touches through and throughout) or for dramatic potential (although thithers certainly p lenty of that as well).Instead, theres a very palpable sense that shes writing this memoir because shes really trying to figure out her relationship with her father, and what it meant, and that putting her memories mound on paper is the best way she can hope to choose sense of it all. The narrative flow does jump backwards and forwards through time, repeating some parts of the story from different angles as they come to bear on different topics, giving it a feeling of thinking out loud, but even so, it doesnt come across as feeling scattered or unpolished.It also helps that her analysis, both of her father and of herself, is super slap-up, with enough emotion to make it powerful but enough age and maturity to make it thoughtful. Bechdels prose is similarly both elevated and immediate, talkative and vocabulary-ridden, but lull clear and forceful. The book is rife with literary allusions and direct textual comparisons, some of which I got, some of which surely went over my head, but which certainly set the intellectual tone of the book.Bechdels art is also great, and I really liked the juxtaposition of her own detailed drawings with the worn-out reproduction of photographs, printed text, and her own diary entries. Overall, this was a very thoughtful and penetrating book. Im sure that there are layers of meaning active homosexuality and the process of coming out that I, as a on-key person, didnt latch on to. But I think theres also a message thats applicable to everyone, some the secrets that our parents keep, and about who they really are, and how we, as children of our parents, can manifest those secrets without ever truly understanding them. out of 5 stars.Summary The entire story is present from the rootage off few pages, in the antique decadence that contrasts peculiarly against father Bruces strict, volatile perimeters his cut-off jean shorts his nose stuck in The Nude by Kenneth Clark and in Alisons tomboyish supplication as a child for his aff ection, channeled instead into the houses restoration, a House of Usher in reverse. It was his passion. And I do mean passion. Libidinal. Manic. Martyred, writes Bechdel, showing Bruce carrying a porch column bended over his back, wearing only shorts that would make the Village pile blush.After Alison types and mails a letter from college telling her parents she is gay, her mother informs her that Bruce, a high school English teacher and part-time funeral home director, had been with men throughout their marriage. The first had been a farmhand at 14 one was even her babysitter, Roy. I had imagined my confession as an emancipation from my parents, but instead I was pulled back into their orbit Why had I told them? I hadnt even had sex with anyone yet. Conversely, my father had been having sex with men for years and not telling anyone. cardinal months later, Bruce died in puzzling (read suicidal) conditions. Alison impulsively links his death to her sexual manifestation the end o f his life coincided with the beginning of my fair play. Bechdel traces the fear of this correlation back and away in time through bizarre, coded interactions with her parents. Watching her narrate cyclonically around this traumatic core a sort of inverted Oedipal complex, the assertion of her erotic truth destroying her repressed fathers life is a devastating, bittersweet head-trip.It is the class period equivalent of a photo mosaic hundreds of tiny images of Alison forming an inescapably reign image of Bruce. Fun Home also pulls off a enactment of how the invisible histories and private lives of parents impress unwittingly upon children emotionally and psychologically. Plenty of books attempt that, but fewer pull it off without connect-the-dots associations or posturing, fewer still with Fun Houses effortless juggling of past, present and future.