Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

My review of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, appeared in the Boston Globe this past weekend. Here is an excerpt:

Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” is a brilliant and bittersweet graphic memoir that chronicles the author’s relationship with her formidably troubled father, Bruce. The book takes its title from the funeral home that Bruce inherited and ran. In his spare time, he restored the family’s 1867 Gothic Revival house. Giving a semblance of life to dead bodies and returning its lost splendor to an old home — Bruce was obviously obsessed with appearances. “He used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not,” Bechdel writes. The deceit lasts for many years; only when Bechdel is in college does she find out that her father is gay.

You can read the rest here.