Alison Bechdel's childhood in the "Fun Home"

It took Alison Bechdel seven years to create Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, and it shows. Her obsessive attention to detail, intricate storytelling framework, and fascinatingly off-kilter artwork combines to create one of the most engrossing memoirs I have ever read.

Bechdel (who is perhaps best known for The Bechdel Test) treads and retreads her childhood, viewing the key events from several different temporal perspectives, adding more information each time, always circling around the central event: her father's sudden death while she was away at college. He was hit by a Sunbeam Bread truck while crossing the road, and although his death was ruled accidental, Bechdel leans toward suicide as an answer.

Her father was a high school English teacher, and both Bechdel's life and her narrative are filled with literary references. Books are everywhere, with classic works by Proust and Fitzgerald providing additional framework for the story.

The Bechdel family lived in rural small town Pennsylvania. The entire family pitched in to help with the main family business, the town's funeral home (which the family nicknamed the "Fun Home"). Bechdel's father had purchased a massive, rotting old mansion and worked at rehabilitating it when he wasn't teaching, embalming corpses or having sexual relationships with his young male students. (It is never entirely clear exactly how far their relationships went. It's probably irrelevant to the story at hand. The fact remains that these serial relationships were staggeringly inappropriate.)

Where Bechdel's father was a closeted homosexual who was, in her words, "a sissy," Bechdel was a tomboy who later realized that she was a lesbian. Her memoir explores the way in which they were alternately opposites and reflections of each other.

The artwork is clean and fascinating, and pairs line drawings with a characteristic grayish-green wash that lends a grim nostalgia to the book. The specificity of the artwork, combined with Bechdel's plainspoken narrative, makes Fun Home truly sing.

Image copyright Alison Bechdel/Houghton Mifflin