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read this book!
Before dinnertime last night I picked up the copy of Alison Bechdel's graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic that I'd recently purchased at Neighborhood Comic Book Shop--and the book would not let me go. I read it cover to cover, with breaks for dinner/Ryan's Hope and for chapter four revision. I finished reading around 1:30 a.m., and wow.
From the jacket blurb: "Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the 'Fun Home.' It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve."
Why did no one tell me about this book? I mean, I've been a fan of Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For since the late 80s, and I knew Fun Home had won awards and stuff. But this is the best book I've read in a long while, and I think pretty much everyone on my FL would love it. It's about family and love and death and sex and literature and truth and lies, it's funny and moving, and it packs quite a wallop in its deft, light way. Read this book, FL!!!
Bechdel side note: I have this very happy memory of reading Dykes to Watch Out For in Washington DC, circa 1989, when I was there for a gigantic pro-choice March on Washington. I wrote a poem about it at the time (when I was in my most rabidly ultrafeminist phase), and I looked it up last night.
Pre-March Rally
In DC the day before the march
Joy and I bookshop
walk in luminous drizzle
"You're not going to march
you're going to skip!"
I accuse; we giggle
The city is full of women
and I'm dumb enough to be
mooning over a man
but happy to skip through the city
with an armload of books by
women; wind up at her girlfriend's
where all Joy's friends are napping
cause they stayed out late last night;
one by one they wake, wander into
the room where Joy and I lounge
reading Dykes to Watch Out For
and poetry; soon we're
a bedfull of five or six
basically heterosexual girls
engrossed in lesbian comics
-- published in Along the Fault (Resident Alien Press: 1990)
Apparently at age twenty-four I hadn't yet developed my distaste for semicolons...
***
A cool link some of you may be interested in (I sure am): Africa Reading Challenge. "Participants commit to read - in the course of 2008 - six books that either were written by African writers, take place in Africa, or deal significantly with Africans and African issues."
From the jacket blurb: "Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the 'Fun Home.' It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve."
Why did no one tell me about this book? I mean, I've been a fan of Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For since the late 80s, and I knew Fun Home had won awards and stuff. But this is the best book I've read in a long while, and I think pretty much everyone on my FL would love it. It's about family and love and death and sex and literature and truth and lies, it's funny and moving, and it packs quite a wallop in its deft, light way. Read this book, FL!!!
Bechdel side note: I have this very happy memory of reading Dykes to Watch Out For in Washington DC, circa 1989, when I was there for a gigantic pro-choice March on Washington. I wrote a poem about it at the time (when I was in my most rabidly ultrafeminist phase), and I looked it up last night.
Pre-March Rally
In DC the day before the march
Joy and I bookshop
walk in luminous drizzle
"You're not going to march
you're going to skip!"
I accuse; we giggle
The city is full of women
and I'm dumb enough to be
mooning over a man
but happy to skip through the city
with an armload of books by
women; wind up at her girlfriend's
where all Joy's friends are napping
cause they stayed out late last night;
one by one they wake, wander into
the room where Joy and I lounge
reading Dykes to Watch Out For
and poetry; soon we're
a bedfull of five or six
basically heterosexual girls
engrossed in lesbian comics
-- published in Along the Fault (Resident Alien Press: 1990)
Apparently at age twenty-four I hadn't yet developed my distaste for semicolons...
***
A cool link some of you may be interested in (I sure am): Africa Reading Challenge. "Participants commit to read - in the course of 2008 - six books that either were written by African writers, take place in Africa, or deal significantly with Africans and African issues."
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[hugs hugs nevertheless]
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I don't dislike semicolons in general, but I pretty much do backflips to avoid using them in my own work... :-)
::hugs::
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