Graphic Reads

Time Magazine named Alison Bechdel's Fun Home one of the Ten Best Books of 2006 and wrote that "the unlikeliest literary success of 2006 is a stunning memoir about a girl growing up in a small town with her cryptic, perfectionist dad. . . Oh, and it's a comic book". Time's decision to award a top spot on the "best of" list to a"comic book" may go a long ways towards giving graphic novels the respect they deserve. Certainly if any graphic novel of 2006 deserved the honor, it is Bechdel's gripping, engaging, immensely intelligent and sympathetic memoir of her childhood and coming of age.

Fun Home takes its name from the funeral home that Bechdel's father inherited and ran as a family business. The book chronicles life with her perfectionist father, a man who is more concerned with restoring their beautiful old house and collecting antiques than with raising his three children. As the book progresses, Bechdel details this love of things beautiful and desire to create aesthetic perfection. Her father goes to great lengths to create the perfect family life, including dressing up his daughter in dresses and ribbons, even while Alison rebels and the family slowly begins to lead separate lives inside their beautiful house. This obsession with image masks the inner secret of her father - that he is gay and perhaps in trouble for pursuing young men. Alison herself is a lesbian, and while she is critical of her father, and struggles with the way in which she and her brothers were brought up, she nonetheless is extraordinarily sympathetic to him.

The book is smart, even erudite, and the various references to literature and philosophy and Greek myth inform the text and lend it a richness of depth. Bechdel explores the often fraught relationship between fathers and daughters with tenderness, refusing to gloss over the many faults of her father while at the same time acknowledging their connection.