![]() ![]() They affect us in a way that clearly no longer affects Bechdel, a tactic she expounds upon later in the book. The opening chapter summarizes his late life, declaring the turning points and revelations with a shocking nonchalance. The tale focuses on Bechdel’s life, through adolescence and college, and on her father, an English teacher, operator of a funeral parlor, and closeted homosexual. The result of the mixture is ultimately humanizing, intimate, and a new graphic novel to add to the small list of works that can be recommended to full-blown skeptics of the medium. The way Fun Home often visually displays its events, through maps, letters, diary entries, newspaper headlines and dictionaries creates a trail of evidence, even as Bechdel uses imaginary tales to convey the strangeness of her family. ![]() Bechdel frames the events with the lives and tales of literary authors and refers to her family as if they were fictions themselves, with “heavy-handed plot devices” shaping their lives. ![]() A memoir that sees itself as a kind of fiction, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic explores the absurdities of Alison Bechdel’s upbringing while simultaneously delivering them as exquisite truths, filling its pages with psychological insight and clever literary allusion. ![]()
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