da | Book Review: Fun Home

I've been reading Alison Bechdel's memoir, Fun Home. The woman continues to rock.

I don't think I've previously seen a New York Times review so glowing:

If the theoretical value of a picture is still holding steady at a thousand words, then Alison Bechdel's slim yet Proustian graphic memoir, "Fun Home," must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced. It is a pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics and memoir) in multiple new directions, with panels that combine the detail and technical proficiency of R. Crumb with a seriousness, emotional complexity and innovation completely its own.

Ms. Bechdel has been working on her memoir since before she started writing and illustrating Dykes to Watch Out For. The effort shows. It's a finely crafted book. The language is considerably more erudite than that of DTWOF. It could have been an affectation, but I think it works. It usually comes across as serious, not pretentious. She invokes a host of writers, including Proust and F. Scott Fitzgerald; she shows that she is both her father's daughter (he himself collected Proust and Fitzgerald) and also gives her another context to be an honest critic of her father.

I loved her description of a family visit to New York City, which she later realizes was shortly after the Stonewall Riots: she knows the absurdity of it, but imagines she could feel "a lingering vibration, a quantum particle of rebellion" in the air.

I also loved her memory of sitting in the living room reading her parents' copy of Dr. Spock, as I did when I was a similar age; she nails the feeling exactly: "Reading [Dr. Spock] was a curious experience in which I was both subject and object, my own parent and my own child."

The topo maps of her home town feel remarkably familiar, since I spent a lot of time staring at the similar one for my parents' tiny town.

And, thanks to the

dykes2watchout4 community, I can report that Fun Home is for sale, in Beech Creek, PA, the town of 800 people where Alison grew up. The house which is a main element of the story; the masterwork of her obsessed and repressed father.