bookheaven | Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One of those stars is in acknowledgement that a) this is well awarded b) I hate memoirs c) this wasn't written for me. I mean it's not bad. The art is very nice but I just couldn't have cared less. This felt like she was working through something in therapy, coming to terms with a distant father who was at best a closeted gay man and at worst a groomer, preying on his students.

Given the title I thought their funeral home business would have played a larger role but this whole thing could have been told without it even being mentioned and nothing would have changed. It's also repetitive, hitting the same beats again and again as she deals with her father's potential suicide (did he jump in front of the truck or simply stumble, no one will ever know).

I'm not even sure how to deal with how pretentious it was as well, with everything compared to great literature. To a point that made sense as it was something she shared with her dad, a love of literature. But how often we went back to that (and to the whole looking things up in the dictionary cliche) made it seemed forced.

But make your own conclusions and don't base whether or not you read this queer memoir based on the cranky review of someone who only read it because of a reading challenge prompt. I wouldn't have looked at a memoir otherwise.

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