Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2006
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (Houghton Mifflin)
At once a coming-out story, an examination of the complex relationship we can have with our parents, and the role of art and literature in processing our lives, first-time graphic novelist Alison Bechdel's Fun Home made for a stunning debut. Moving more-or-less backward in time, Bechdel peels apart her nearly affectionless childhood, her English-teacher father's apparent suicide and the way that his closeted homosexuality became the dark mirror version of her outward lesbianism. Smart, darkly funny and a little fearless, Fun Home reads like a true-life modern American Gothic.