Fun Home

To be perfectly honest, I did not pick Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic because it looked particularly interesting. Had I done that, I probably would have read Catie's graphic novel: Persepolis. The reason I'm read what I did was purely practical. In "Reading in an Age of Attention Deficit," an English course I took last semester, Fun Home was on the syllabus. Unfortunately we spent way too much time on James Joyce's Ulysses, so we never got around to Fun Home. Since I'd already paid for it, I figured it'd be a waste to not use it here.

The plot is not at all what I would ever lean towards were I picking the book. It's a nonlinear autobiographical narration of Alison Bechdel's childhood and early adulthood. She grew up in a distant family and came out as a lesbian a few months before her father's death which was presumed to be a suicide. The only way she ever bonds with her father is over their homosexual tendencies (her dad had many affairs with much younger men, some students). As i said, not a book I'd ever normally read.

Still, I was rather surprised by the level of the prose and the amount of literary allusions that could exist in a graphic novel. Look at just the first page!

While this graphic novel did not sway me on its content, it did sway my views on what a graphic novel can be. Not that I'm about to go run to the nearest Barnes & Nobles to ransack their graphic novel collection, but at least I have a greater appreciation for the genre now. Until this, my only experience was with Naruto and Fruits Basket in middle school. Let's just say the prose isn't quite as advances there...