(no subject)
I'm thinking about buying this book.
June 18, 2006
'Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,' by Alison Bechdel
The Things They Buried
Review by SEAN WILSEY
The New York Times
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. Then there are the actual words. Generally this is where graphic narratives stumble. Very few cartoonists can also write - or, if they can, they manage only to hit a few familiar notes. But "Fun Home" quietly succeeds in telling a story, not only through well-crafted images but through words that are equally revealing and well chosen. Big words, too! In 232 pages this memoir sent me to the dictionary five separate times (to look up "bargeboard," "buss," "scutwork," "humectant" and "perseverated").
A comic book for lovers of words! Bechdel's rich language and precise images combine to create a lush piece of work - a memoir where concision and detail are melded for maximum, obsessive density. She has obviously spent years getting this memoir right, and it shows. You can read "Fun Home" in a sitting, or get lost in the pictures within the pictures on its pages. The artist's work is so absorbing you feel you are living in her world.
Bechdel is known to readers of the indie press as the author of a long-running comic strip called "Dykes to Watch Out For" - a Sapphic "Doonesbury" serialized in 50 alternative newspapers and collected in multiple volumes, with titles like "Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life Forms to Watch Out For" and "Hot, Throbbing Dykes to Watch Out For." She's a lesbian, and sexuality looms large in her memoir. Bechdel's father, Bruce, was gay (as she puts it: "a manic-depressive, closeted fag"), and "Fun Home" is at its heart a story about a daughter trying to understand her father through the common and unspoken bond of their homosexuality. The hopelessness of this desire is deepened by the fact that Bruce Bechdel was hit by a truck and killed shortly after his daughter wrote her parents a letter that announced, "I am a lesbian." As it happens, Bruce Bechdel was the town funeral director (hence the title, which comes from the family's name for the funeral home). His daughter believes his death was a suicide, brought on in part by her own confession. She draws herself beside his coffin, a thought bubble coming out of her head: "I'd kill myself too if I had to live here."
"Here" is the 800-person hamlet of Beech Creek, Pa., and, more specifically, the family home, a fetishistically restored Victorian mansion on Maple Avenue; the vessel into which her father poured his love and passion and repression, and the second ironic fun home of the title. The Bechdels lived in this museum in a state of profound isolation. "We ate together, but otherwise were absorbed in our separate pursuits." Alison's childhood was that of a small-town girl living in a big house where "astral lamps and girandoles and Hepplewhite suite chairs" were treated with more tenderness than she was. One of the few breaks from Beech Creek comes when the family takes a trip to New York City, with a baby sitter (one of the boys her father also collected - and probably slept with) in tow. The post-Stonewall Greenwich Village is described, longingly, as a place where "a lingering vibration, a quantum particle of rebellion," hung in the air; it's a place, it is implied, where Bruce Bechdel could have had another life. But his daughter does not dwell on the possibility. Instead, with the humor that fills every sad moment in this story, she labels the smell on the corner of Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue South according to its constituent parts: "putrefaction" for a trash can; "diesel" for a bus; "menthol" for a cigarette; "pastry" for the exhaust from a chimney; "Brut" for a pedestrian; and "urine and electricity" for the subway entrance. New York City olfactory history in a single panel - and one that captures the effortless scope of "Fun Home." As a recent trip to this corner will attest, only the electricity remains.
It's odd that this memoir, a work of meticulous personal reportage, is referred to as a "graphic novel" in the accompanying letter from its publisher - though I was relieved to discover that I'm not the only one in need of a trip to the dictionary.
My copy began with the following unmissable notation, titled "Alison Bechdel, on Creating 'Fun Home' ": "I've always been a careful archivist of my own life. . . . I've kept a journal since I was 10. I've been logging my income and expenses since I was 13. . . . All this detritus came in handy as I wrote 'Fun Home,' as a corrective to the inevitable distortions of memory. I discovered that the actual documentary truth was almost always richer and more surprising than the way I had remembered a particular event. And it was certainly more interesting than any possible way I could have fictionalized it." This is one of the great truths of nonfiction writing, and I would amplify by pointing out that the emotion and depth of "Fun Home," as with all honest memoirs, come entirely of watching Bechdel try to make sense of the confusing facts of her own life and history. If it were fiction (or fictionalized) it would be meaningless.
Depressingly, memoirists now seem compelled to pre-emptively defend the factuality of their works, under the assumption they will inevitably be questioned. Memory is no longer entirely credible in the genre of memory. In fact (and to ensure factuality), it seems possible that not only are the roles of memoirist and documentarian about to be combined, but the roles of reviewer and investigative journalist are as well.
With this in mind I took a trip to Beech Creek, Pa., shortly after completing "Fun Home." Two hundred miles west of Manhattan on I-80, then south on Route 150, past the spot where Bruce Bechdel was killed (signs there now read "Special Enforcement Area," "Don't Tailgate" and "DUI: You Can't Afford It"). As I approached the town a placard announced "Bechdel's Birds & Beasts Zoo and Gift Shop," no doubt the enterprise of one of the numerous Bechdel cousins. I pulled into a parking lot. Maps on Pages 30 and 146 showed me where I was. A memoir you can navigate by!
I took an odometer reading and compared it with Bechdel's assertion that "On a map of my hometown, a circle a mile and a half in diameter circumscribes: (A) Dad's grave, (B) the spot on Route 150 where he died, near an old farmhouse he was restoring, (C) the house where he and my mother raised our family, and (D) the farm where he was born." True. A conversation with a local established that Beech Creek is pronounced "Bitch Crick" - a detail Bechdel never works into her narrative, though she does describe her father's Pennsylvania accent as "bumpkinish." I visited the cemetery. Bechdel's drawings of it are accurate right down to the almost unnoticeable radio tower on a mountain behind the graves.
Of course the true memoirist's mission, like the novelist's, is not so much establishing factuality as getting to the heart and truth of something - and there is no way to get there dishonestly. Having read "Fun Home" I believe that Bechdel's made the journey. But my certainty is blessedly un-fact-checkable.
Leaving town I drove up Maple Avenue, past the Bechdel residence. It is for sale: $279,900 and you can live in "Fun Home" full time. The real estate agent's exhortation on the front lawn: "Don't miss your chance to own a piece of history!"
Sean Wilsey is the author of "Oh the Glory of It All," a memoir, and the co-editor, with Matt Weiland, of a book about soccer, "The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup."
June 18, 2006
'Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,' by Alison Bechdel
The Things They Buried
Review by SEAN WILSEY
The New York Times
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. Then there are the actual words. Generally this is where graphic narratives stumble. Very few cartoonists can also write - or, if they can, they manage only to hit a few familiar notes. But "Fun Home" quietly succeeds in telling a story, not only through well-crafted images but through words that are equally revealing and well chosen. Big words, too! In 232 pages this memoir sent me to the dictionary five separate times (to look up "bargeboard," "buss," "scutwork," "humectant" and "perseverated").
A comic book for lovers of words! Bechdel's rich language and precise images combine to create a lush piece of work - a memoir where concision and detail are melded for maximum, obsessive density. She has obviously spent years getting this memoir right, and it shows. You can read "Fun Home" in a sitting, or get lost in the pictures within the pictures on its pages. The artist's work is so absorbing you feel you are living in her world.
Bechdel is known to readers of the indie press as the author of a long-running comic strip called "Dykes to Watch Out For" - a Sapphic "Doonesbury" serialized in 50 alternative newspapers and collected in multiple volumes, with titles like "Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life Forms to Watch Out For" and "Hot, Throbbing Dykes to Watch Out For." She's a lesbian, and sexuality looms large in her memoir. Bechdel's father, Bruce, was gay (as she puts it: "a manic-depressive, closeted fag"), and "Fun Home" is at its heart a story about a daughter trying to understand her father through the common and unspoken bond of their homosexuality. The hopelessness of this desire is deepened by the fact that Bruce Bechdel was hit by a truck and killed shortly after his daughter wrote her parents a letter that announced, "I am a lesbian." As it happens, Bruce Bechdel was the town funeral director (hence the title, which comes from the family's name for the funeral home). His daughter believes his death was a suicide, brought on in part by her own confession. She draws herself beside his coffin, a thought bubble coming out of her head: "I'd kill myself too if I had to live here."
"Here" is the 800-person hamlet of Beech Creek, Pa., and, more specifically, the family home, a fetishistically restored Victorian mansion on Maple Avenue; the vessel into which her father poured his love and passion and repression, and the second ironic fun home of the title. The Bechdels lived in this museum in a state of profound isolation. "We ate together, but otherwise were absorbed in our separate pursuits." Alison's childhood was that of a small-town girl living in a big house where "astral lamps and girandoles and Hepplewhite suite chairs" were treated with more tenderness than she was. One of the few breaks from Beech Creek comes when the family takes a trip to New York City, with a baby sitter (one of the boys her father also collected - and probably slept with) in tow. The post-Stonewall Greenwich Village is described, longingly, as a place where "a lingering vibration, a quantum particle of rebellion," hung in the air; it's a place, it is implied, where Bruce Bechdel could have had another life. But his daughter does not dwell on the possibility. Instead, with the humor that fills every sad moment in this story, she labels the smell on the corner of Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue South according to its constituent parts: "putrefaction" for a trash can; "diesel" for a bus; "menthol" for a cigarette; "pastry" for the exhaust from a chimney; "Brut" for a pedestrian; and "urine and electricity" for the subway entrance. New York City olfactory history in a single panel - and one that captures the effortless scope of "Fun Home." As a recent trip to this corner will attest, only the electricity remains.
It's odd that this memoir, a work of meticulous personal reportage, is referred to as a "graphic novel" in the accompanying letter from its publisher - though I was relieved to discover that I'm not the only one in need of a trip to the dictionary.
My copy began with the following unmissable notation, titled "Alison Bechdel, on Creating 'Fun Home' ": "I've always been a careful archivist of my own life. . . . I've kept a journal since I was 10. I've been logging my income and expenses since I was 13. . . . All this detritus came in handy as I wrote 'Fun Home,' as a corrective to the inevitable distortions of memory. I discovered that the actual documentary truth was almost always richer and more surprising than the way I had remembered a particular event. And it was certainly more interesting than any possible way I could have fictionalized it." This is one of the great truths of nonfiction writing, and I would amplify by pointing out that the emotion and depth of "Fun Home," as with all honest memoirs, come entirely of watching Bechdel try to make sense of the confusing facts of her own life and history. If it were fiction (or fictionalized) it would be meaningless.
Depressingly, memoirists now seem compelled to pre-emptively defend the factuality of their works, under the assumption they will inevitably be questioned. Memory is no longer entirely credible in the genre of memory. In fact (and to ensure factuality), it seems possible that not only are the roles of memoirist and documentarian about to be combined, but the roles of reviewer and investigative journalist are as well.
With this in mind I took a trip to Beech Creek, Pa., shortly after completing "Fun Home." Two hundred miles west of Manhattan on I-80, then south on Route 150, past the spot where Bruce Bechdel was killed (signs there now read "Special Enforcement Area," "Don't Tailgate" and "DUI: You Can't Afford It"). As I approached the town a placard announced "Bechdel's Birds & Beasts Zoo and Gift Shop," no doubt the enterprise of one of the numerous Bechdel cousins. I pulled into a parking lot. Maps on Pages 30 and 146 showed me where I was. A memoir you can navigate by!
I took an odometer reading and compared it with Bechdel's assertion that "On a map of my hometown, a circle a mile and a half in diameter circumscribes: (A) Dad's grave, (B) the spot on Route 150 where he died, near an old farmhouse he was restoring, (C) the house where he and my mother raised our family, and (D) the farm where he was born." True. A conversation with a local established that Beech Creek is pronounced "Bitch Crick" - a detail Bechdel never works into her narrative, though she does describe her father's Pennsylvania accent as "bumpkinish." I visited the cemetery. Bechdel's drawings of it are accurate right down to the almost unnoticeable radio tower on a mountain behind the graves.
Of course the true memoirist's mission, like the novelist's, is not so much establishing factuality as getting to the heart and truth of something - and there is no way to get there dishonestly. Having read "Fun Home" I believe that Bechdel's made the journey. But my certainty is blessedly un-fact-checkable.
Leaving town I drove up Maple Avenue, past the Bechdel residence. It is for sale: $279,900 and you can live in "Fun Home" full time. The real estate agent's exhortation on the front lawn: "Don't miss your chance to own a piece of history!"
Sean Wilsey is the author of "Oh the Glory of It All," a memoir, and the co-editor, with Matt Weiland, of a book about soccer, "The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup."