“My graphic memoir Fun Home could be anywhere from the LGBT shelf to “Lesbian Fiction” (even though it’s all true) to “Memoir” to “Biography” to “Graphic Novels.” Once I stopped in a bookstore to sign copies, and the clerk found it in “Lesbian Mystery,” which was a mystery indeed.”
American cartoonist Alison Bechdel (creator of the cult comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For) had this to say, in an NY Times interview, when asked where she typically spotted Fun Home, her 2006 memoir, inside an average bookstore. One is inclined to chuckle, and agree with Ms. Bechdel, for her memoir does indeed defy classification, and rather impressively at that. Fun Home revolves around the dual themes of the author’s difficult relationship with her father, a repressed closeted gay man who committed suicide when Ms. Bechdel was almost twenty; and Ms. Bechdel’s discovery of her own homosexuality. Because of the book’s decidedly non-linear narrative (all of this is revealed in the first twenty-odd pages itself), the above statement does not qualify as a spoiler.
The “confessional” novel or memoir has proven to be fertile imaginative ground for the alternative/underground comix (deliberately misspelled to differentiate them from ordinary comics) movement in America; from the pioneers, the old-timers like Robert Crumb, Harvey Pekar and Art Spiegelman to more recent luminaries like Craig Thompson, James Kochalka and Jeffrey Brown. Spiegelman’s memoir Maus, (which was serialized in the seminal alternative comics magazine RAW) had its characters drawn as anthropomorphic animals, as did Crumb’s most famous series Fritz the Cat, while Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor had a signature realist, gritty appearance which suited its closely autobiographical storylines. Ms. Bechdel was one of the many artists on American Splendor, who would make a mark later on with their own autobiographical books, including, of course Robert Crumb himself, who was beginning to be seen as the de facto spokesperson for the movement.
Although Ms. Bechdel’s exquisite attention to the finer points of a panel, and her obvious technical proficiency bring to mind some of Crumb’s finest works, Fun Home ultimately owes more of a debt to Pekar’s writing style, with its searing, no-holds barred honesty as it delves deep into the emotional lives of its subjects with clarity, wit and erudition. Alison Bechdel was born and brought up in Beech Creek in rural Pennsylvania, which had, as of the 2000 census, a population of 717. The title of the book itself comes from the family’s ironic moniker for the town’s Funeral Home run by Bruce Bechdel. As such, themes of sexual identity are constantly dovetailed with bleak, oddly funny homilies about death, suicide in particular.
Fun Home bursts at the seams with literary allusions; as well as other pop cultural references from movies, music and politics. In the first chapter itself, the author’s father Bruce Bechdel is likened to the mythical Daedalus, the artisan who built the labyrinth which housed the beast Minotaur. In a flurry of quick-footed, fluid panels, the parallels between Bechdel (who had a monomaniacal passion for elaborate restorations of old houses) and Daedalus are established. (“He could transfigure a room with the smallest offhand flourish. He could conjure an entire, finished period interior from a single paint chip. He was an alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a Daedalus of décor.”)
The page above is a good example of Ms. Bechdel’s style in Fun Home, and why it works. Juxtaposition, when executed well, is particularly effective in the graphic medium, something which she demonstrates here. Images bridge the gap between what is explicit in the text, and what is left unsaid or suggested via context; and one can’t help but get the feeling that no set of words, however cleverly or meticulously crafted, would have served the purpose of the story better (which is the ultimate acid test for any narrative device). In the first panel, Alison Bechdel the author/narrator is talking (in the text) about Minotaur, “the half-bull, half-man monster”; while Alison the character is faced with the looming shadow of her father, cleverly drawn to appear scepter-like, menacing. In the following panels, young Alison does manage to escape the house temporarily (as opposed to the unlucky youths trapped in Daedalus’ labyrinth) but we the readers know it to be a hollow victory: Alison must inevitably return to her antiquated, maze-like house and her father. Finally, Alison’s feelings of abandonment directed at her father are inverted back onto the original myth itself, as the author wonders aloud if, perhaps, Daedalus wasn’t similarly indifferent towards “the human cost of his projects”, as a reflective Alison is drawn walking quietly against the backdrop of her father’s Christmas decorations. This is narrative art at its finest, most elemental.
Bruce Bechdel is shown to have been obsessed with Jay Gatsby, the eponymous hero of Fitzgerald’s classic novel, and his ultimate suicide is discussed in the light of A Happy Death (the third chapter shares its name with this book, which Bruce was reading in the days leading up to his suicide) and The Myth Of Sisyphus by Camus. The Addams Family house, with its “ironic reversal of suburban conformity, its familiar dark, lofty ceilings, peeling wallpaper, and menacing horsehair furnishings” cuts a little too close to the bone for young Alison. Ms. Bechdel compares her father’s lifelong dilemma about being a closeted gay man to Proust’s metaphor of the diverging paths in A la recherché du temps Perdue. She also channelizes Baudrillard in parts, where she refers to her house as “not a real home at all, but a simulacrum of one, a museum.” (The "simulacrum" part is also slyly hinted at with the profusion of photographs, letters, maps etc. which are featured in the book; and also with the fact that the author’s mother is a stage actress) Never once do these references and comparisons sound contrived, because, as the author puts it, “My parents are most real to me in fictional terms. And perhaps my cool aesthetic distance itself does more to convey the arctic climate of our family than any literary comparison.” Consider this masterful passage, where Ms. Bechdel turns the Proust word “invert” around (Proust used it to describe his explicitly homosexual characters)
Ms. Bechdel can be very, very funny when she wants to. We’re in splits when we see the author’s mother running lines with her; the play being The Importance of Being Earnest by that prince of scandal, Oscar Wilde. ("An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be. It is hardly a matter that she could be allowed to arrange for herself.") The book is also strewn with period details which are not always apparent. For instance, when Alison goes to college and attends a gay rights group meeting, in a small corner of the panel, one can see a derogatory slogan directed at Anita Bryant, the former Oklahoma beauty queen, singer and vociferous advocate for discrimination against homosexuals. In this context, it has to be said that Ms. Bechdel’s account in the book, of her own sexual awakening, is, like Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (the book Didion wrote about coping with the death of her husband of nearly forty years, writer John Dunne), “an act of literary courage”. A stirring scene comes to mind, in which Alison and her father try (very awkwardly) to convey their true feelings to each other, during the course of a drive to the theater. Notice how the artwork conveys the moments of silence, and the overall rhythm of an uneasy conversation like this one.
Ms. Bechdel’s joke about finding Fun Home in the “Lesbian Mystery” section of a bookstore notwithstanding, it is heartening to note that her book made more of a splash than comic books typically do. TIME magazine was sufficiently moved to call Fun Home its book of the year, and it featured on several other year-end lists for 2006. But then, an important aspect of Ms. Bechdel’s work in Dykes to Watch Out For has always been about challenging existing stereotypes about women, whether it’s books, magazines or Hollywood. In a strip titled “The Rule” (1985), Ms. Bechdel coined her own little nugget of pop cultural immortality, the Bechdel test. In the strip, a character says she only watches a film if it satisfies the following rules:
1. It has to have at least two women in it,
2. Who talk to each other,
3. About something other than a man.
The late and much-lamented American writer David Foster Wallace once said that the point of reading fiction was “to feel less lonely inside”. Fun Home, while not being fiction at all, possesses this quality by the bagful, and is an essential read for readers across gender, age or, indeed, sexual orientation.
