The Tragic House of Doilies

Allison Bechdel's graphic memoir, Fun Home A Family Tragicomic, is compact and full to the brim. The story of her child hood is laid out in episodic groups of panels while the text bounces from her adult reflections to her childhood inner dialogu, to passages of canonical literature that she find revealing. The literary inserts both illustrate her dense, itellectual public relationship with her father and her fantasy of him.

The inclusion of actual letters and diary entries provides traction to her tale. It lends credibility and allows the reader to breathe in the world she is showing without suffocating under her perception of. Hearing the mother and father's authentic voices made the retelling of this very private family story into a public document, a statement, rather than singular personal experience. The author maintains her balance just on the other side of neutrality. Her own childhood diary with it's scrawling carrots and mini "I thinks" crammed between sentences serve to illustrate her character and reveal her then-state of mind as compared to the ongoing review from her older self.
Interesting how she littered the book with those Sunbeam Ranch bags... She rubs it in how small and closed their entire world theirs was. Her fathers death didn't come from some far off outsider truck, rather from a company who's very products had fed his mortal self for years and years. It was a great way of showing how enmeshed the family was with their surrounding and their community. It is that very enmeshment that compelled her father to hide his identity from himself all those years. She manages to clearly convey that small town mentality.

I was very described to hear the author describe her father as a "sissy" (90). I was almost... insulted for him? I really liked and identified with the father character and this word somehow seemed like a great betrayal of their trust. Though she laughs at his death and never really admits to their utter propinquity, I found them a very loving father daughter unit. They spent a lot of time together sharing work and play. Their ongoing book swap during college and his continuing, earnest letters seem a testament to that. It seemed that their misunderstandings had more to do with his religious small town midcentury upbringing than it did with a personality clash or an abuse. Indeed, she admits that "we were inversions of one another" (98), declaring that they were one and the same, reflections of one another.

The art in this book is incredibly enjoyable. The characters have strong, recognizable featuresand wonderfully emotive faces. The father is studiously rendered, he has the same smile and jaw lines throughourt. Bechdel employs a delicate blue wash to shade, highlight, and light her images. What in Lucky were hard, dark spaces between objects are in Fun Home these prismatic subtleties. For instance, the sunset she watches with her father on page 150 is very convincingly lovely. the wide open picture with the figures in sillouette and the sky a fluctuating blue wash, is for comic art, really evocative. The last panel on page 86 is another great example. Here she has silloutte, line shading, blue wash, and white space to show the lights, which highlights the toner of the text by placing the characters so firmly in distinctly separate spaces and adds visual nuance. She uses a different style of art for the chapter-headings, inserting scratchy black and white drawings of photographs that are more realistic than the panel art. They add depth to both the visual texture of the book over all and to the characters themselves; the audience gets to see the family members outside of Bechdel's impersonations of them. The anatomy drawings (44) are thrilling: realistic, horrifying, and frank. She includes genitalia, body hair, wounds and the like without exaggerating it.