Fun Home
by Alison Bechdel
Cape, £12.99; 232pp
Published: Setpember 14
UK sales: 567
ALISON BECHDEL DID not expect Fun Home to cause such a fuss. Having built a cult fanbase with Dykes to Watch Out For — a razor-sharp cartoon strip chronicling the lives of a group of intellectual lesbians — she did not imagine her memoir straying beyond this coterie of enthusiasts.
After all, a gay woman’s relationship with her funeral-director dad? In a comic strip? It doesn’t scream “Watch Out, Dan Brown!” does it? Yet Fun Home has made the New York Times bestseller list, garnering high praise from such names as Sarah Waters and Nick Hornby. Why? Because it is a moving, erudite and gripping work whose themes — family, adolescence, sexuality, death — are anything but niche.
Fun Home is Bechdel’s attempt to understand her father. An English teacher and part-time director of a funeral home (the “fun home”), Bruce Bechdel’s real passion was restoring the family’s gothic mansion. He was a per- fectionist, obsessed by ornament, and wanted his home to be “a sort of still life with children”. But it was a cover-up: Bruce used his skilful artifice “not to make things, but to make things appear what they were not. That is to say, impeccable”.
Things were not impeccable not least because he was a closet gay. Having announced her own homosexuality, Alison discovers her father’s affairs: with men. She is shocked: “I’d been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parent’s tragedy.”
Three months later her parents divorce. Two weeks after that Bruce is killed by a truck. Alison is convinced that it was suicide: the culmination of the unfolding catastrophe that had been his life.
Drawn with remarkable poise, and inked in two-tone aquamarine, each panel is beautifully revealing: from a Christ-like Bruce carrying a stone column on his shoulder, to Alison’s lover’s bed, strewn with books and naked limbs.
But what many reviewers dwelt on was the quality of the writing. The text is a joy: as perceptive and intricate as the illustration. This must be one of the most literary comic books yet produced. Alison’s father’s love of Fitzgerald and Joyce informs her own reading of his life, and the book is threaded with allusions: like Gatsby, Bruce preferred a fiction to a reality; like Dedalus, he is decidedly “not a hero”.
Can a comic be literature? For readers still on the fence, Fun Home just might be the book finally to push them off. ()
INTERVIEW
What motivated you to write Fun Home?
I’ve pretty much wanted to tell this story since a year after my father died, when I was looking through some old family photographs and found one of a young man in his underwear. I recognised him as a student of my father’s who babysat my brothers and me. Finding this visual evidence of my father’s secret life was very compelling. I found other photographs: my father as a young man wearing a women’s bathing suit, my own childhood pictures of a boyish girl, shots of my mother over the years, in which her expression transforms from hopefulness to resignation to bitterness. I knew that I had a story that was begging to be told — lesbian daughter inadvertently outs gay father who commits suicide. But the painful circumstances that make the story so compelling rendered me incapable of telling it until another 20 years had passed.
How long did it take? How did you re-create your childhood in such detail?
It took me seven years to write and draw. I don’t have a photographic memory, I have something better—photographs. I relied heavily on family albums to get the details right. What I couldn’t find among our snapshots, I found in Google Image Search. There has been much discussion of the “truthfulness” of memoirs. How truthful is yours? I spend a lot of time in my book questioning the reliability of my own narration. I really don’t know whether my dad killed himself, or what he did with those teenage boys. When I was a kid, I had a phobia about not telling the truth—I was afraid that the things I was writing in my diary were somehow inaccurate. I’d write: “Mom and John went uptown.” But how did I really know they went uptown? I got very anxious about the possibility that I was inadvertently lying. I think that’s probably a good model for memoir writing: acknowledging the inadequacy of your own methodology. It’s all inadequate, really, memory and documentary evidence alike. My memory can recall discrete events quite clearly—the time my Dad got arrested for buying beer for an underage boy, the summer mum played Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, Nixon’s resignation, my first period, the plague of locusts that descended on us, the storm that blew all our trees down. But I was stunned to learn, on consulting my childhood diary, that all these things happened at the same time. You can’t make that up. If you did, it would be really bad writing.
Did writing the book bring you closer to your father?
Well, closeness probably isn’t the right word, as he’s dead and the relationship has become rather one-sided. But I do feel that I understand him better.
How have your mother and brothers reacted?
My mum is delighted about the book’s success, and will crow about it to anyone within earshot. Yet she’s quite upset about the content, about the fact that I’ve disclosed all this intimate information about our family. I’m not quite sure how my brothers feel. I think they have a certain level of discomfort with seeing their lives made into fodder for someone else’s story. I thought it was possible to undertake this project in a responsible way with regard to my family. I even had a wild fantasy that it would heal my family. But now I know that no matter how good your intentions are, writing about other people always has a hostile element to it. It violates their subjectivity.
In Fun Home, you often use other books to shed light on your story — do you use literature to make sense of things?
I use whatever’s at hand. Literature, newspaper clippings, TV shows, snapshots, random ephemera. Literature was a useful lens with which to examine my father’s life because books were particularly important to him.
How do you feel about the rising profile of comic books? What cartoonists/comic-book artists do you admire?
I’m pleased that comics are increasingly becoming considered a legitimate form of expression. Yet at the same time, I mourn the loss of their outsider, under-the-critical radar status. Some freedom has been lost. It’s the same feeling I have about the increasing acceptance of homosexuality. It’s a good thing, but a certain edge is lost. I like Hergé, R. Crumb, Lynda Barry, Chester Brown . . . I have very catholic taste when it comes to comics. Fun Home has been praised for its writing.
Would you write an un-illustrated book?
No. Images have become part of my syntax, I can’t say what I want unless I have pictures as well as words.
What next?
More autobiographical work. I’m starting another memoir project. I’ve decided that all I’m really interested in is myself, so I’m just going to go with it.
