Word: bechdel
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...ALISON BECHDEL, FUN HOME...
...unlikeliest literary success of 2006 is a stunning memoir about a girl growing up in a small town with her cryptic, perfectionist dad and slowly realizing that a) she is gay and b) he is too. Oh, and it's a comic book: Bechdel's breathtakingly smart commentary duets with eloquent line drawings. Forget genre and sexual orientation: this is a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other...
...hate this room," she says in the panels. "When I grow up my house is going to be all metal, like a submarine." This says it all. The text, "I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture," feels superfluous. Bechdel draws in a clear, moderately realistic black and white style with a cool, greenish-grey wash creating highlights and depth. Though maybe not the most visually memorable of cartoonists, Bechdel's conservative approach has clarity on its side. She could have trusted it more. As a test, try reading...
...works cited include The Greek Myths, Camus's The Death of Sisyphus, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, The Great Gatsby and eventually back to the Greek myths by way of James Joyce's Ulysses. The "Ulysses" chapter takes place near the end of Fun Home, when Bechdel must read it for course credit. At the same time she comes out to her parents, though her father says nothing about it or his own truth. "Like Stephen and Bloom at the National Library, our paths crossed but did not meet," she writes. Her mother reveals the truth...
...Though it may be a bit wordy, Fun Home's depiction of a love-starved childhood leaves a lasting impression. Bechdel recalls her period of OCD, her father's arrest for buying an underage boy a beer, and family trips accompanied by male baby-sitters with as much of a sense of their tragedy as their dark comedy. She will slip in the occasional sick joke amid the scenes of frustration and bewilderment. Loaves of Sunbeam bread repeatedly make appearances, for example, echoing her father's eventual demise by being run over by a truck from that same company. Gradually...