wolffyluna

It's been a little while since I did this! In my defense, I get a lot of my reading done on the bus or waiting for lectures, so with teaching break these past few weeks, I haven't read that much. Also, The Persian Boy by Mary Renault is longer than it looks.

I'm still trucking away at that, but in the mean time, my request came through at the library, and I got to read Fun Home by Alison Bechdel.

Fun Home is an autobiographical graphic novel, focusing on Bechdel's childhood, family, and relationship with her father (who she only found out was gay after she came out, and who died in... suspicious circumstances a few weeks later.)

Overall, I really liked it. The art is pretty and expressive, and splash backgrounds are in particular evocative. And I like the way she spirals through her life, as you slowly build up context to understand what the next detail means. (It strikes me very much like those points where something happens that puts a past event into context, makes you go 'oh. OH', but someone has conveniently put all those revelations in order for you!)

I have some quibbles, but they're kinda weird quibbles to make about an autobiography. Like, it's a bit weird to complain about the plot and presentation of one! Bechdel definitely chose what order to put things in, chose how to present things, there are deliberate artistic choices, including those about the plot-- but it's also, like, her life.

My fairest quibble is that the ending didn't quite work for me. To give a non-spoilery explanation, the ending tries to go with a metaphor that made me go 'whah?' It doesn't quite fit with all the things that happened before hand!

(My unfair quibble can basically be summarised as being annoyed at the narrator being a lil' unreliable. Which as an unreliable narrator and reader myself-- I can't really complain about it.)

If you like literature about effed up families: you will probably like Fun Home. If you're thinking about reading this because of the lesbianism: lesbianism is certainly there, it's important-- but you gotta like analysis of effed families to like this one, in my opinion.