Out In The Mountains : A+E - Books: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy

by Cynthia Potts

       Alison Bechdel is a remarkable writer and artist. For over twenty years, we’ve been reading her work in “Dykes to Watch Out For,” in which Bechdel, via an amazingly complex cast of characters, captures the essence of our lives, our loves, our hopes, our dreams, and, of course, our dysfunctions.
     She’s got a sharp eye and a razor-quick wit - both of which she turns on herself in her latest book, the autobiographical graphic novel Fun Home.
     “Was he a good father?” she asks. “I want to say, ‘At least he stuck around.’ But of course, he didn’t.”
     In fact, the entire book is an elegy of absence, love and longing for a distant figure. The gap unbridgeable - the father devoted to historical architecture and interior decoration, the daughter eschewing all things female - except for pivotal points where the pair met through books.
     These are the moments we keep returning to - thoughts on the Great Gatsby, the English class he taught and she attended, the pivotal transfer of Collete’s Earthly Paradise - that illuminate the growing if not rapport, at least comfortable common ground between the two, which was abruptly terminated by her father’s suicide.
     Of course, Bechdel has a mother. She’s present, yet in some ways more absent than Bechdel’s father. We see her protecting her children from tyrannical rages, yet hiding her personal hurts through participation in the local reperatory company. Echoes of betrayal and abandonment resonate loudly through the recounting of a summer rainstorm that soaked a dissertation.
     Bechdel herself speaks of the sheltering distance of death. Her mother is still very much alive, and one is left to wonder both if the painful edges of the motherdaughter relationship will smooth at some distant date.
     But for now, we’ve got a portrait of an intellectually accomplished family, one that perhaps lost its way emotionally, and the role that loss played on Bechdel. She has a remarkable gift for portraying family conflicts with a sort of split vision: the perception she had at the time as a child, coupled with the perspective that life gives.
     It’s sad, it’s sweet, it’s touched with a bittersweet nostalgia and a tender affection.
      The autobiography is, by its very nature, supposed to be an open look at one’s life, but Bechdel takes it deeper. We see things in an odd context, as realization grows upon realization, as frames of reference open wider and wider. It’s masterfully done, and key to the fact that she keeps revisiting certain incidents, searching for the truth of her father.
     It’s important to note that Bechdel is a master of the graphic novel, not just of poignant storytelling. So much of this story is told via gesture - a hand paused, mid moment, passing a title from the shelf, an eyebrow cocked, a chin cupped, a sheaf of class notes waved furiously toward a studly high school football player. There are moments when Bechdel is at her most elequont - yet she is “saying” nothing at all.
     Fun Home does more than take you into Bechdel’s past. It takes you inside her life, gives you a front seat view of an unfolding childhood. The subtitle, “A Family Tragicomic,” sums it up perfectly - some moments you can’t help but laugh, while other times you wish you could.

Cynthia Potts lives in Plattsburgh, New York.