Alison Bechdel can write, draw, and pull infinite quantities of pathos and humor from her memories of growing up in a funeral home in a small Pennsylvania town. Her graphic memoir, Fun Home, which came out this summer, examines her early life, in particular her relationship with her father, a closeted homosexual who died at the age of 44, possibly a suicide. Bechdel is a lesbian and the wonderfully evocative panels detail her attempts to cohere her father’s closeted sexuality with her own coming out and coming of age. Entwined with literary classics and novelistic in scope, Fun Home is an utterly absorbing, luminous, genre-bending work for book-lovers or for anyone who has ever tried to figure out where they came from.



A wonderful review of the book here.