I’d been meaning to read Fun Home by Alison Bechdel for ages, so finding it in Hillhead Library was my chance. In brief, it’s an autoboigraphical comic focused on her literature-loving, interior-design obsessive and secretly homosexual father, and how this eventually impacts upon her feelings of her own sexuality.

The main thing that struck me, maybe because I can relate to it on some level, is the conflict Bechdel clearly feels about her mother and father. Although a distant, sometimes cruel character, Alison clearly loves her father and craves his attention. When his fascinating sexual habits are revealed, this seems like her chance to build a bond with him. However, the book is full of quotes from her father’s old love letters to her mother, as if Bechdel is desperate to prove that her father wasn’t all ‘bad’, and that his betrayal of the family makes her as angry for her mother as it renders sympathy for her father.

Something that annoyed me is the NY times quote on the front cover, which claims Fun Home is a combination of the genres comics and autobiography. For the millionth time, comics aren’t a genre, they’re a medium! You can make a horror comic, a romance comic, an adventure comic, a crime comic, a humour comic…..