Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

genre: graphic memoir 

In this graphic memoir, Alison tells the story of both her childhood in rural Pennsylvania and also her coming of age as a gay woman during a time when being gay was both subversive and slowly becoming a thing one could talk about.  Soon after her father passes away, she finds out that he was also gay and this bombshell makes Alison revisit her whole past, looking for clues to help her understand the man who so confused her growing up.

I picked this up from my neighborhood's Free Little Library and I had no idea what it was about when I started it.  I was taken in from the beginning with Alison's observations and stark illustrations that grounded me in her experience.  It is a very literary book, in the sense that Alison assumes we understand the general plot of several books that she uses to compare her own life to that of other complicated stories. I like this devise but also it sometimes pulled me out of the story, to have so much text from other books I'm unfamiliar with thrown in.  By the end, though, I appreciated Alison's journey while also feeling so much compassion for her and even a little bit for her Dad.  Reading about Gay history and Gay rights in this country is like a punch in the gut, it's so upsetting, so I feel like it is important for these stories to be on our shelves and in our minds.

content warning: open door sex/nudity, adult themes