Fun Home by Allison Bechdel

Fun Home by Allison Bechdel is a graphic personal narrative about her childhood, her experiences with discovering her sexuality, and her relationship with her family, particularly with her emotional distant father who had been hiding secrets from her and the rest of his family.

I found reading this very intriguing and personable. Bechdel isn't afraid of representing her true self from the very beginning, looping all the way back and forth between childhood and adulthood. She's extremely perceptive of the world around her, whether its hindsight or just a life of forced observation by her father's restrictive nature. The slow reveal of her father's closeted homosexual nature that foils Bechdel's own sexual discovery creates a whole new sense of the relationship between the two, and the nature of their secretly dysfunctional family. The whole time, you are wondering with Bechdel whether she was the cause for her father's suicide with her coming out to her parents. With the reveal of her father's secrets, it brings out new perspectives on who Bruce really was, why he acted the way he did, and whether he really intentionally killed himself on the road. The situations she goes through, from coming out to her family, to getting the phone call from her mother about her father's sexual history, to her relationship with her first girlfriend, are intensely personal and unabashed. You don't ever get a sense that she's omitting any details, as it is a memoir she fully deliberate explores her past and how it affected her for the rest of her life. Bechdel is brutally honest, and it is refreshing to hear a woman's voice, unhidden and providing a perspective long silenced in media.