My father, my self.

Hamer, Diane Ellen

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

by Alison Bechdel

Houghton Mifflin

232 pages, $19.95

DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR is the much beloved comic strip that Alison Bechdel has been writing for over twenty years. The strip, and the eleven graphic books she has also produced, center on Mo and her friends, who live in a small, unnamed city where they come out, get jobs, struggle in relationships, marry, have children, and adjust to changes in the gay community over the last two decades. Bechdel has created such a lifelike portrait of this community that Mo is often confused by fans with Bechdel herself.

Now Bechdel has written a graphic memoir, specifically about her complex relationship with her father. She grew up on a ridge nestled in the Allegheny mountains in Pennsylvania, where her father ran the family funeral home--hence the ironic title of her book, Fun Home. Much of her childhood seems more Southern than Pennsylvanian, with its lazy summers and extended family and friends close by. She also grew up with a sense of the macabre that played itself out within the family, becoming not only nonchalant about dead bodies, grieving families, and graveyards, but also dimly aware that, apart from the corpses, things with her family just weren't quite right. That there were secrets of which she was unaware came to light only when her father died, which occurred when Bechdel was nineteen. Her first clue came while she was looking through her father's old photographs and she found one "of a young man, a student of my father's, in his underwear."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Throughout the story, which has comments and narration by the adult Bechdel in text boxes above the frames, we're given hints of what turns out to be her father's closeted bisexual activity and the stresses it put on her parents' marriage. Alison's connection with her mother is not so closely examined--it's a tense relationship--showing that, as odd as her relationship with her father is, she is finally more closely aligned with him. But her mother is an unsung hero in this story, which Alison finally recognizes shortly before her father dies: "Like Odysseus's faithful Penelope, my mother has kept the household going for twenty years with a more-or-less absent husband." The secrets and stories are eked out, both to Alison as she grows up, and to the reader. By the end of the story, her coming to terms with this troubled man and the legacy he left her brought me to tears.

As readers of Dykes to Watch Out For know, Bechdel has an uncanny knack for noticing the smallest nuances of our community as well as its overall patterns. Whether it's disclosed by the titles in a pile of books, a poster on a wall, a voice coming from the TV or radio, or a platitude on a tee shirt, she almost always gets it right. Here is a family scene in which The Flying Nun is on TV in the background, another in which Nixon is resigning. In this way Bechdel places the action in a cultural context without resorting to heavy-handedness. Her vast knowledge of pop culture, past and present, manifests itself throughout her work. Her literary references range wide, and she quotes from many texts to amplify and mirror the story as it moves along, from Colette's autobiography, which her father gave to her to read when she was a youngster, to the works of Albert Camus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jill Johnston, Kate Millet, and James Joyce (where she homes in on the relationship between Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses). Alison's realization that she was a lesbian came from a book she found in a bookstore that confirmed the suspicions she'd had about herself since age thirteen: "A revelation not of the flesh, but of the mind."

Bechdel's habit of drawing her characters very simply and yet distinctly contrasts with the attention to detail that she devotes to the background, those TV shows and posters on the wall, not to mention the intricacies of the funeral home as a recurring backdrop. None of this, by the way--the father, the funeral home--appears in Dykes to Watch Out For, so I for one will be less likely now to confuse Mo with her creator. While reminding us of what Bechdel has given to the community through her work, this book also serves as a tribute to both of her parents and their contribution to her development as an artist.