“Fun Home” by Alison Bechdel

What initially drew me to “Fun Home” was the fact that it was recently turned into a Broadway musical. And the fact that I had never read a graphic novel memoir before. I was pleasantly surprised by it! The combination of the two is pretty genre breaking. Adding the images did help to visualize it, especially when discussing how the father would restore the house, since I know nothing about architecture. And it didn’t feel like a comic book since it was the text accompanying the images instead of the dialogue. This changes the flow slightly, makes it more of a third-person narration than anything else.

The story is a little hard to keep track of since she backtracks a lot, but that’s the way that memory goes. She has a few different storylines going through her book: her father, herself, variations on this theme. It’s also difficult to tell the characters apart in the drawings since she went through a few different haircuts and I could never keep her siblings straight. The rest of them aren’t that important really, you can just skip over any details that aren’t apparent.

There’s also a lot of literary references used in the book. It opens with the comparison of her and her father to Daedalus and Icarus and other characters from Greek legends. It then goes on to talk about other literary comparisons between them. It even includes how his father admired Fitzgerald while courting her mother and how her realization that she’s a lesbian coincided with her taking a class on “Ulysses”.

Overall, this was a great book to try something new. I’m a little confused how they turned it into a musical, but we’ll see if I ever get around to checking it out.