written by Alison Bechdel

Just one look at Alison Bechdel’s mother’s face tells you all you need to know about her marriage. Therein lies the true source of the emotional heft graphic novels can carry: the ability to combine poetic, sometimes wrenching, text with a visualization that drives the point home subtly yet definitively. It’s one of the reasons Fun Home truly gels, because this is a story of hidden secrets and desires that burn just beneath the surface. Bechdel, a young girl in this story, details how she grew up the child of a closeted gay man in a small Pennsylvania town. Ultimately, her father died at the age of 44, possibly from suicide. While he lived, he was a troubled and troubling man, and his legacy affects his daughter greatly. When he decides to renovate the family home, he gives Bechdel the grist for her poignant story. Years later, she is just coming to understand this man and who he was, what shaped his life and why he suffered in silence. It’s a tribute to her storytelling skills that she’s able to do it without becoming heavy-handed. She balances the tragic with the comic just enough to make the reader feel as though he or she is eavesdropping on the neighbors down the street.

-- John Hogan

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