I was prompted into reading Fun Home by Sinduja (See below. Warning:
plot spoilers in her review as well as mine). A tragicomic, in the same vein as
Persepolis, Alison Bechdel uses the brevity of the format with great effect to
explore her complex relationship with her father. I’ve come to believe that the
Graphic novel is a powerful way to deal with difficult and emotionally
overloaded subjects in an engaging, thought provoking way with the
illustrations speaking a thousand words. I also enjoyed the thematic
organization of the narrative instead of a strictly chronological one.
To me Fun Home, in many ways, illustrated how we often use
childhood experiences to justify the way we turn out as adults (not an entirely
unfounded argument) but the fact is causation is mostly retrospective. Bechdel
for example, traces her obsession with keep her spaces spare to her father’s
obsession with creating a Victorian home, a restoration project that lasted his
lifetime.
I enjoyed how Alison describes the effect of growing up in a
family that ran a funeral home and how this stunted her ability to express
grief at her father’s demise.
Alison then muses about how we believe we will react to
certain events in specific, stereotyped ways and how, when actually confronted
by those situations we discover that our reactions are quite different – that
we perhaps cannot shed those public tears and labour under a much more private
coming to terms with.
Another part that struck me as particularly poignant was how
she tried to claim some responsibility for her father’s death and holds on to
guilt as a lasting bond. I was reminded of this particular portion again
yesterday as I was watching No Reservations, one of my absolutely favourite
movies, for the umpteenth time. There’s a scene in the movie where Zoe is found
by Kate at her mother’s grave and Zoe tells Kate that she came there because
she was afraid of forgetting her mother.
Through the journey of the graphic novel, Alison traces, one
by one, the various things that bonded her with her father in both antagonistic
and compassionate ways. From books to their aesthetic preferences to her sexual
orientation, Alison finds the hand of her father in every aspect of her life
and eventually realizes that she can understand that bond only to a certain
extent through rational contemplation, and that perhaps, she depends on him far
more than she knows or cares to admit.
Review also posted here.
