Notes from September's Not Fiction Book Discussion

Many of us attending the September 2 discussion of Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir The Fun Home had never read a graphic narrative before. We admitted that we assumed the graphics would merely reiterate the text. Needless to say, we were surprised and gratified by Bechdel's book. We discovered that her graphics are an essential part of her narrative, a "text" to be read just as carefully as her words. Bechdel told an interviewer for The Comics Journal, "It's very important for me that people be able to read the images in the same kind of gradually unfolding way as they're reading the text. I don't like pictures that don't have information in them. I want pictures that you have to read, that you have to decode, that take time, that you can get lost in. Otherwise what's the point?" We enjoyed sharing and decoding some of our favorite panels. One of my favorites is on the first page, where we see Bruce Bechdel has been reading Anna Karenina. It was with great delight that I recalled the first line of that novel: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This panel taught me how to read the book and introduced its subject in a delightful and compact way.

Several critics feel that Bechdel's use of literary and pop culture allusions is too heavy-handed, rather unnecessary to telling her story, and ultimately weakens the story. We disagreed with these critics. We found the allusions to be an integral part of her story, another opportunity for the reader to decode Bechdel's tone and purpose. Bechdel self-consciously refers to the tone of her memoir, in large part created by her use of allusion, as "my cool aesthetic distance." This "cool aesthetic distance" serves both to indicate the pain her relationship with her father has caused her and, at the same time, to show her great debt to him. Her purpose in writing the book, we decided, is to reconcile the pain with the debt and to acknowledge the identity she shares with her father beyond genetics, familial obligation, or sexuality. Bechdel told The Village Voice that " . . . the book is an expansion of my childhood diary, in that it's this perseveration on detail. You know? In some ways I felt like it was almost a penance to trace everything out in such detail." And she told The Advocate, "I realized eventually that what the book was really about was not his suicide or our shared homosexuality or the books we read. It was about my creative apprenticeship to my father; it was about becoming an artist."

We will continue our discussion of family secrets and identity October 7 with Daniel Mendelsohn's memoir The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. We hope you will join us at the Main Library or here on the blog.