![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileThis Sunday I was decompressing from the DSA convention and did something I have missed doing very much this pandemic, which was have cocktails in Harvard Square and then buy a bunch of books. I kept it to three this time which is still perhaps ill-advised given that I’m not staying at home this weekend and will have to lug them all around across state lines twice before I can get them home. But anyway.
One of the books was Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, a graphic novel about Bechdel’s life growing up as a young butch lesbian in a small town in Pennsylvania with her dysfunctional family. The title refers in part to the nickname the family gave to the funeral home her grandparents owned, where her father also worked part-time and where Alison and her siblings and cousins all grew up thinking was perfectly normal. It’s also clearly a rather sarcastic title, as the actual house Alison grew up in wasn’t very fun at all--it was a big rambling museum of a mansion that her father was obsessed with restoring, which went unappreciated by the small children attempting to be small children in there, and everyone was very emotionally distant and had their own solitary creative pursuits to keep themselves occupied and out of each other’s way. Alison’s parents’ marriage was weak, largely because her father was a closeted gay man who had impregnated and married Alison’s mother in a youthful fit of experimenting with play-acting at being F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and was now stuck in a tiny Pennsylvania town surrounded by extended family members in the postwar U.S. Bruce is not winning any World’s Greatest Dad awards anytime soon but you certainly have sympathy for how he ended up that way. Things are further complicated when Bruce dies not too long after Alison comes out to her family, which is when she also learns that he was gay. Much of the book is on the contentious relationship between these two closeted queer family members in very different places in life. Their relationship isn’t all bad, but their communication with each other is heavily mediated by their shared love of literature, since they’re too repressed and WASPy to directly express any love to each other. Death, in the very different forms of Bruce’s sudden and mostly-unexpected one and of the stable and more-homey-than-her-actual-house Bechdel Funeral Home, retroactively colors Alison’s understanding of her parents and her younger self.
It is perhaps unsurprising that, though I rarely read graphic novels and also rarely read literary fiction about people’s sad childhoods, if I were going to read some and really like it it would definitely be the one about the weird queer girl who grew up in a funeral home. That is a set of subjects that is definitely targeted towards getting me to read the thing. But it is also genuinely very good, and being a graphic novel I could read the whole thing over the course of one bath, which made it even better.
Bechdel’s newest graphic novel is apparently about her relationship with exercise, and now I think I might have to read that, too.
One of the books was Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, a graphic novel about Bechdel’s life growing up as a young butch lesbian in a small town in Pennsylvania with her dysfunctional family. The title refers in part to the nickname the family gave to the funeral home her grandparents owned, where her father also worked part-time and where Alison and her siblings and cousins all grew up thinking was perfectly normal. It’s also clearly a rather sarcastic title, as the actual house Alison grew up in wasn’t very fun at all--it was a big rambling museum of a mansion that her father was obsessed with restoring, which went unappreciated by the small children attempting to be small children in there, and everyone was very emotionally distant and had their own solitary creative pursuits to keep themselves occupied and out of each other’s way. Alison’s parents’ marriage was weak, largely because her father was a closeted gay man who had impregnated and married Alison’s mother in a youthful fit of experimenting with play-acting at being F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and was now stuck in a tiny Pennsylvania town surrounded by extended family members in the postwar U.S. Bruce is not winning any World’s Greatest Dad awards anytime soon but you certainly have sympathy for how he ended up that way. Things are further complicated when Bruce dies not too long after Alison comes out to her family, which is when she also learns that he was gay. Much of the book is on the contentious relationship between these two closeted queer family members in very different places in life. Their relationship isn’t all bad, but their communication with each other is heavily mediated by their shared love of literature, since they’re too repressed and WASPy to directly express any love to each other. Death, in the very different forms of Bruce’s sudden and mostly-unexpected one and of the stable and more-homey-than-her-actual-house Bechdel Funeral Home, retroactively colors Alison’s understanding of her parents and her younger self.
It is perhaps unsurprising that, though I rarely read graphic novels and also rarely read literary fiction about people’s sad childhoods, if I were going to read some and really like it it would definitely be the one about the weird queer girl who grew up in a funeral home. That is a set of subjects that is definitely targeted towards getting me to read the thing. But it is also genuinely very good, and being a graphic novel I could read the whole thing over the course of one bath, which made it even better.
Bechdel’s newest graphic novel is apparently about her relationship with exercise, and now I think I might have to read that, too.