Alison Bechdel's autobiography Fun Home is a beautiful and poignant story of growing up LGBTQ+ in a repressive and alienating community. The book deals with Bechdel's childhood, her coming out to her parents and friends, her father's death, and the realization that her father had been a closeted gay man. It's a great book for members of the LGBTQ+ community and for anyone interested in gaining an appreciation for the experience of LGBTQ+ persons, or anyone simply interested in a well-told memoir.
In addition to being a talented memoirist, Bechdel is quite funny. There are many moments throughout the book that are laugh-out-loud funny. This juxtaposition of levity and grief is part of the appeal of the book. It seems to mirror Bechdel's own experience of her father's death. Near the end of the book, Bechdel recalls telling a friend of her father's death and laughing uncontrollably, leading her friend to disbelieve her. I relate to this on a personal level. When my best friend died in high school, I don't remember ever feeling sad in the sense that I thought I should. When I told friends about it, I had to try to look sad and not to smile or giggle whenever I mentioned it. The absurdity of my friend's sudden death made it difficult to contextualize his absence. Bechdel describes this feeling so perfectly.
Bechdel is also great at describing her introspective process of trying to contextualize both her father and herself in the LGBTQ+ community of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. In the final chapter, she describes her attempts to picture her father as an out gay man, what he would have been like. But she isn't sure if it's anachronistic to do that. Was her father really gay, or bisexual, or something else? It's hard to theorize about, and Bechdel doesn't spend too long on the topic, but the way she describes the experience is very authentic.
Bechdel also grapples with the difficulty of assigning blame to her father for his transgressions. Her father, a high school English teacher, had illicit relationships with some of his students, and with Bechdel's childhood babysitter. These relationships were concealed from Bechdel's mother, who was naturally hurt when they came to light. Bechdel takes some room to try and work through these. In a repressive and anti-gay society, how wrong was her father to cheat on his spouse? How wrong was he to have relationships with his students, when being an above-the-board gay man wasn't an option (or at least not an easy one)? These kinds of questions are important and timely. Like any community, the LGBTQ+ community has its problems which must be discussed. It's not an easy sort of thing to contemplate, because people like Bechdel's father are both victims and villains in some ways. Nevertheless, these kinds of difficult discussions are necessary.
Besides the primary topics Bechdel discusses, she makes many humorous and insightful asides that are very compelling. At one point, Bechdel remarks “It's said, after all, that people reach middle age the day they realize they're never going to read Remembrance of Things Past". A Google search returns no other results for this claim besides Bechdel's book, so whether this is her original thought or truly a claim that others make is unclear. Regardless, it's very funny. Later, Bechdel quotes some passages from Swann's Way, the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past, including Proust's obvious love for flowers and blossoms, comparing this to her own father's love of blossoms and beautiful things, including his favorite flowers, lilacs. She concludes “If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.” Another such humorous observation is Bechdel's discussion of her early English literature classes and the state of literary analysis. In one panel her bearded English professor draws a crude diagram on the blackboard and exasperatedly says “Get it? Marlow's steamer? Penis. The Congo? Vagina.” About this and other analytical reaches, Bechdel says “I didn't understand why we couldn't just read the books without forcing contorted interpretations on them.”
All in all, Fun Home is a very moving and powerful book. It is good in many ways for different groups. For LGBTQ+ people, it is representative and truthful. It's affirming and can help validate the LGBTQ+ experience, whatever that may be. For non-LGBTQ+ people, it's great at describing the struggle that many LGBTQ+ people undergo. It helps to show the real harm that can come from repression and from policies like “Don't Ask, Don't Tell”. LGBTQ+ erasure causes real harm, much like “separate but equal” policies did. There's a lot more in the book than what is written here, and it would probably take a much longer write-up than this to do the book justice. Bechdel's status as one of the foremost feminist and LGBTQ+ writers and thinkers is well-deserved.