Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Alison Bechdel revisits a childhood shaped by her father's exacting standards, the family's funeral business and a home full of unspoken tensions. Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and funeral director whose carefully maintained surroundings could obscure what was happening within the family. After Alison comes out as a lesbian in college, she learns that her father had a hidden history of his own. His death soon afterward leaves questions she can no longer ask him directly. Combining drawn scenes, remembered conversations and literary connections, this graphic memoir investigates the uneasy relationship between daughter and father, and the difficulty of understanding a shared past when its most important facts arrived late.