Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

I had some mixed reactions to the Bechdel book, a memoir of growing up with a closeted father. I thought at times she pushed so hard to connect the goings on in her life to some kind of historical or literary context. Her father was very Proustian, it seems, and her family's life was straight out of In Search of Lost Time, and also some James novels, and Gatsby. But throughout, Bechdel is critical of her need to make these connections. I mean, she's aware of what she's doing, and treats it, in her self-conscious narration, as some kind of tic she can't help. This assuages the obvious manipulation of experience she's got going on.

And then toward the end there's this great moment with Ulysses, which she reads in a winter-term course because it is her father's favorite, and yet slacks behind in class because she has better, more vital reading to do. Which is to say: books by and about lesbians. (Bechdel came out in college.) So I thought this was going to be some inevitable refutation of, like, the patriarchal, "big books" canon that her father somewhat forced on her, but no.

I think I only want to read memoirs in comics form, in the future. The great thing about the form is how economical it is with time. So many pages have panels next to one another that move from Alison as a toddler to Alison as a teen, then back to toddlerhood and then all the up to her near-present self. These sorts of moves would be either incomprehensible, in a written memoir, or so glacially slow and dull if the writer made sure we were following her jumps in time. This way, the comic can work a lot like how our memory works, which is so rarely chronological.

For a while I thought Bechdel's paneling and general structure was really straightforward, not really pushing the form anywhere, until I got to the "climax" of the book (or maybe it is the climax) on pages 220-221. To avoid runing the "plot" of it, what has been throughout the book a pretty loose and varied style of paneling becomes on these pages this lock-step grid where every image is the same. Just the dialogue changes. It's not only a great mirror to what's going on in that cramped little space of her father's car, but it also works, like I said, as a visual climax, some kind of epiphanic inevitability.

I like it when comic books let their art signal narrative shifts, I guess is what I'm saying.