A year after her father died, when she was twenty years old, Alison Bechdel was
looking through some old family photographs and found one of a young man in his
underwear. She recognized him as a student of her father's and a family
babysitter. She also came across a photo of her father as a young man, wearing a
woman's bathing suit. There were also snapshots of her mother over the years, in
which her expression transformed vividly from hopefulness to resignation to
bitterness.
Alison found her own childhood pictures, of a girl who looked like a
boy. She knew that these snapshots conveyed much more information than she
suspected, and there was a deeper story begging to be told, about a daughter who
inadvertently "outs" her gay father, who meets a tragic end. But the painful
circumstances that make her story so compelling also rendered her incapable of
telling it for a long time. Alison was inhibited not just by the shock of her
father's death, but by the impact of his life — his domination and deception,
and the alternately encouraging and crushing influence that he had on her
creativity. In her early twenties she attempted, in prose, to tell her part of
the tale, but it eluded her. Instead, she turned her creative efforts to an
entirely different project: drawing a comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out
For.
Years have passed, and Alison is now a comic artist with a cult
following. Her strip is syndicated in fifty newspapers and she has a quarter of
a million books in print. And she is finally ready to tell her own story.
Through twenty years of social change, Alison's accomplished drawing skills, and
her wizened emotional perspective comes Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Alison Bechdel, a cult-favorite comic artist, has been a careful
archivist of her own life and kept a journal since she was ten. Bechdel grew up
in rural Pennsylvania. After graduating from Oberlin College, she moved to New
York City, where she began drawing Dykes to Watch Out For in 1983 — "one
of the preeminent oeuvres in the comic genre, period" (Ms.). The strip is
syndicated in fifty newspapers, translated into several languages, and collected
in a book series with a quarter of a million copies in print. Utne
magazine has listed DTWOF as "one of the greatest hits of the twentieth
century." And Comics Journal says, "Bechdel's art distills the pleasures
of Friends and The Nation; we recognize our world in it, with its
sorrows and ironies." In Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic Alison Bechdel is
finally telling her own story.
LINKS
visit Alison Bechdel's Web site
a conversation with Alison Bechdel
excerpts from Fun Home
information on buying this book
