Fun home by Alison Bechdel

Fun Home é um marco dos quadrinhos e das narrativas autobiográficas, além de uma obra-prima sobre sexualidade, relações familiares e literatura. Um labirinto da memória trazido à tona com graça, humor e a força das maiores realizações artísticas. Pouco depois de revelar à família que é lésbica, Alison Bechdel recebe a notícia de que seu pai morreu em circunstâncias que poderiam indicar um suicídio. Nesta aclamada autobiografa em quadrinhos, ela explora a difícil, dolorosa e comovente relação com o pai. A autora retraça também os próprios passos, da criança que cresceu entre os cadáveres da funerária da família à jovem que se encontrou nos livros e na arte. Num trabalho imensamente poderoso e sutil, Bechdel trilha o caminho de sua vida em busca de um pai tão enigmático quanto incontornável.

Although we share an alma mater, Alison Bechdel is sufficiently older than me that when I first heard of her, she was already a realtively famous sensation, with a popular webcomic, which was soon to be followed by an eponymous test that would be cited in every feminist movie review for the rest of time. So, thinking about her as an unassuming child, forced into girly clothing was a little odd.

Usually, memoir (especially graphic memoir) is form over substance, as no one's real life is actually very interesting, but Bechdel's childhood may be an exception to that rule. Her early years are dominated by a gothic house, kept to exacting detail; a mortuary that seems to resurface in the narrative at particularly apropos moments and a relationship with her father that is largely dominated by F. Scott Fitzgerald allusions.

Bechdel drops hints along the way that she is not the most reliable of narrators, and I found that although Fun Home is ostensibly about her dad, it's mostly about how Alison Bechdel cast him as a foil in her own life, and then uses that to reinterpret her own.