My life in books

Funhome: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel

I found this to be a compelling example of memoir as graphic narrative. Of course, Bechdel is one of the best graphic novelists out there – the Dykes to Watch Out For volumes are an amazing blend of storytelling and political satire, as well as being a record of life in the US during a period of great social and political change from a lesbian perspective. Mark my word, future social historians are going to be citing the DTWOF all over the place.

But personal narrative is a different kind of storytelling, and much harder to do successfully, and Bechdel has done it brilliantly.

Funhome: A Family Tragicomic is an honest, poignant and often painful story of the artist as a baby dyke, in which the processes of growing up different, coming of age and coming out are paralleled against the slow revelation of a family secret – a father’s struggle with his own sexual difference – that ends tragically.

In reading Funhome, it is impossible not to think about the role that society’s demand for the appearance of “normalcy” and the suppression of difference, especially sexual difference, has played, and continues to play, in the personal and family lives of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered, two-spirited and otherwise queer people. Bechdel’s father pays an enormous price for attempting to compromise with society’s demands – as do all the other members of the family. Bechdel herself, a generation later, faces fewer barriers in coming out and in her story, contrasted with that of her father’s, we see the hope she has begun to emerge from the shadow of secret desires that surrounded and coloured her childhood.

I found it to be an intensely moving book. It’s interesting to me that while I am not a big fan of the graphic novel, two of the most interesting personal narratives I’ve read in recent years – this book and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis – have been graphic works by women who adopt a relatively simple style. Stripped to its essentials, the messages become even stronger.

Naturally, because the book is an honest examination of sexual themes in a young girl’s life, there have been howls of protest about it, particularly since it has been assigned in at least one university level English course. Visually, there are some panels that do contain sexual images. And of course it’s a book about growing up gay with a father whose repression of his own homosexuality leads to all sorts of unhappiness. To those who protest, I can only say, "grow up – and acknowledge that sex is a part of growing up while you’re at it." The panels in question are narrative, not erotic, and as such are less sexually charged than at least half of the billboard ads you’ll see walking down the street in any North American city. Frankly, I think this book should be required reading for every high school student in North America.