Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
I try to exercise literary discipline (reading the Daily Telegraph over a soy latte does not count!) during stolen moments whilst waiting for tardy friends and even tardier public transport.
I was once afraid of novel a la graphic, however in the case of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, the sexy cinematic combination of image and text provides nothing but pure melancholic magic, and a lot of laughter. Before the series Six Feet Under, Bechdel's memoir of growing up in a funeral parlour dives between her putting makeup on the corpses and arranging death lilies, and growing up queer, albeit with a closeted gay funeral director father and a mother that befits a paper cut-out.
The family is lovingly and critically portrayed in comic-strip style, illustrating her childhood as a 'still life with children'. Covering love, loss, dead bodies and dreams, Bechdel's raw and pointed observations are laugh/cry out loud brilliant. Read it.
Format: Book
Motivation: Good with a whiskey in the bath
Keywords: Alison Bechdel, autobiography, Graphic novel
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