The Bookworm says... Yes!! Fun Home by Alison Bechdel is a stunning graphic memoir. Beginning
with Alison as a young girl, she realizes that she and her father were very
alike, but also nothing alike. As she grows older and matures, her relationship
with her father becomes more and more forced. She's trying to be herself, while
he tries to express himself through her. She grows older still, and the
relationship grows tenser. A funeral home director/high school English
teacher/historical restoration expert and his lesbian cartoonist daughter,
trying to live their own lives while stuck in a perpetual orbit around each
other.
An illustrated history of her fragile relationship with her
father, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is a shimmering gem of an autobiography. It
details their relationship throughout her entire life, but not in a linear manner.
In any given chapter you may have Alison as a child, Alison as a teenager,
Alison as a new adult, or all three. Bechdel frequently alludes to Ulysses and
The Odyssey as comparisons to her and her father's relationship, which works
excellently. The detail conveyed in the illustrations could not be reproduced
in any other form. Heartbreaking, humorous, detailed, and intimate, Fun Home is like no other.
"My
father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a
particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta. But the infinite
gradations of color in a fine sunset--from salmon to canary to midnight
blue--left him wordless."