Fun Home

Sometimes you have to explain why you don't like something, whether someone else is questioning you or not. That's how I feel about Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, a graphic novel chronicling she and her father's tumultuous relationship and how she put his life back together after his death.  A description like that doesn't sound unique, doesn't sound worthy of being dissected, and I'm not totally sure that it is. However, what is unique about Bechdel's story is that both she and her father are gay -- he secretly harbored the secret for years, while she came out to her family when she was roughly 19.  They never have anything really like a falling out, nor do they have something as major as a reconciliation; instead, their quiet conflict pervades much of Bechdel's life, and her memories of her father reflect on the odd legacy he left behind.

The graphic novel set-up, which took Bechdel over 8 years to create (watch an interview about her process here), intermingles classic literature with Bechdel's story, a style that makes sense in the context of her life and relationships.  Her father was an English teacher, and she an avid English student; the inclusion of the stories of Daedalus and Icarus, along with multiple references to the works of James Joyce, serve to create a massive metaphor that extends throughout the entire novel.  Daedalus is the Cretan inventor who constructed the Minoan labyrinth, the home of the Minotaur; he was later imprisoned by the King of Minos to keep the secrets of the labyrinth safe.  Daedalus then built two sets of wings for himself and his son, Icarus, so they could escape.  The wings were sealed with wax, which meant that both father and son had to fly steady and even to keep the sun from melting the way or the waves of the ocean from destroying the feathers. Icarus, however, got cocky, flew too high, and the wax melted -- Icarus plummeted to his death.  Eventually, James Joyce came around and, inspired by this tale, named his main character in both Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses Stephen Daedalus, drawing a not-so-subtle parallel between the genius of the inventor and the genius of Joyce's autobiographical character.

However, the graphic novel's comparisons sometimes seem forced.  Bechdel will occasionally use page after page of explanation in order to get this metaphor to make sense, and even then it still might not make sense.  At various points in the novel, both she and her father are supposed to be both Daedalus and Icarus -- if that's not a strained comparison, I'm not sure what is.  I get her point: both she and her father are human, they both have flaws, and they both have reached high for their arts and suffered setbacks.  But the method she employs to bring this metaphor to life takes too much effort to put back together.  It fits what she wants, I supposed, but it doesn't read well.

The only time it makes any sense (any easy sense, perhaps) is on the last page of the novel.

So, potential 

It's not much of a spoiler, since I'm not going to explain how the novel gets to its ending, but still: just in case.

The last page talks about how when Alison Bechdel really needed her father to be there, he was -- the line is something like "he was there to catch me when I flew," but I don't have the book in front of me as I write.  Here, the comparisons between Daedalus and Icarus make sense -- Bechdel is both in that she is ambitious and she is trying, and she is Icarus in that she is overly confident in where she's going when in reality she has no idea what will happen.  Her father is Icarus in that he is disconnected, he is pushing the limits of his life too far, and he is cruel in his own way, and he is Daedalus in that he is there for her without meaning to be, he is smart and clever and inventive and hiding, and he is her father.  He let her explore but stayed her protector, and he improves on Daedalus in that he stays to catch her instead of letting her fall.  Here, once, the metaphor makes perfect, unadulterated sense.  Too bad it's on the very last page.

It just doesn't make sense in the context of the rest of the graphic novel. Hm...

What I do find interesting about this extension of the metaphor is its implication of a positive relationship between Bechdel and her father.  As the image above suggests, they have a rather difficult relationship -- he wants her to be something she's not, while she expects emotions and connections from him that aren't there.  Frankly, the complaint that her father is distant most of the time and has trouble being a parent is common  considering the time period of the mid to late 70s.  And in addition, her dad obviously has quite a few personal issues -- he is a struggling closeted homosexual and possibly a criminal, as there are hints at his relationships with teens and students in his classes, among other more minor offences.

Their relationship seems somewhat abusive at times, as her father is a tough parent with high behavior and aesthetic standards.  The family as a whole is somewhat disjointed, each in their own little space, which adds to the distant feelings the novel generates. Bechdel herself deals with a lot of issues within the novel, a lot of issues that most of the time don't seem to have anything to do with her father.  She spends time discussing getting her period and her college experiences, how she figured out she was a lesbian, how she conquered her OCD.  And none of these seem to have any real connection with her father -- both on the page as Bechdel presents them and as I try to draw inferences as I read the book.

So overall, I just don't understand why Bechdel wrote this novel. It's fragmented -- it's about memory, not about creating a cohesive story, which is unusual as a writing style but not unusual as a thought style. In fact, that's how much of human thought is: fragmented, pulling up memories as they connect to current experiences.  So I understand how the events of the novel are put together, I just don't understand why.  Bechdel admits in the book that she doesn't experience much grief over her father's death, which would be my first thought for motivation in writing it.  I know that many nonfiction pieces don't have overarching themes or messages -- part of reporting life as it happens instead of artificially infusing it with meaning -- but there is still a reason for something to be written.  She could be writing to find closure; she struggles with the possibility that her father might have committed suicide, as in the prevailing opinion of most of her family. But I have to say, there are journals for those types of struggles, and I would imagine there is little reason for that to be made public.

Ultimately, the best idea I can come up with is that she's writing to make sense of a life in which a major player dies, to make sense of her life in relation to her father's death. Maybe there isn't something important Bechdel is trying to do here, maybe she's just documenting the overlap of two confused, struggling lives.

Perhaps I need to read it again.  Or save it and read it again someday far in the future after my own father dies (though he is neither homosexual nor distant, so there won't be a ton of similarity). Or maybe I just don't like this book.

Push

This book is hard to come away from unaffected.  Truly.  The various elements wash over each other and weave together to create a poverty-stricken, illiterate experience that is overwhelming.

Opening this book and diving in is a challenge in itself.  Since Clareece "Precious" Jones is illiterate (at the beginning of the book, she reads well below a 2nd grade level, despite being 16 and in 8th grade), her language reflects her abilities -- a written style that is largely phonetic, misspelled, and difficult to get used to.

Keep going. Once the language starts to make sense, the story unfolds quickly and clearly.  In some ways, the language resembles that of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, a style that is challenging but after about 30 pages fully understandable (and by the end, you too are using that language).  That kind of power with language is impressive.

Precious is a young teenage mother: she has one child, a mentally challenged girl, and is pregnant with her son at the beginning of the novel.  Expelled from school but driven, Precious enrolls herself in an alternative school in order to earn her GED. This public life is complicated enough, yet Precious's personal life is in utter turmoil.  She lives with her mother, a cruel woman who claims that Previous "stole" her man -- Precious's father, who is also disgustingly the father of both of Precious's children.

This relationship makes up one huge part of what makes this novel so controversial.  Precious is the product of an extramarital affair on the part of her father, who began abusing her when she was a very young child.  When she was 12, her own father impregnated her for the first time -- a mix of genes that created a child that Precious names Little Mongo after her Mongoloid appearance, a description of the facial features of those with Down Syndrome that Precious hears in the hospital.  Her second pregnancy is also via her father, a fact that somehow infuriates her mother because her father wants to have sex with Precious instead of with her.  The level of confusion and disgust rose continually for me as I put this all together; I can't imagine parents behaving in that kind of way or a child who seems to believe that this life is normal. And Precious never seems to fight back, as though she has accepted this treatment. That idea is absolutely repulsive, and really it is the only thing that seems to contradict both the overall theme of the novel and the personal motivation of Precious herself: Push.

The title of the novel emphasizes the overall message: Push. Keep going. Don't give up.
Precious hears this message over and over, and never in a place one might expect. The best example is when she gives birth to her daughter on the kitchen floor: The paramedic who responds tells her to push, a command meant to help her focus to have her baby. But the message resonates throughout the book. Precious thinks back to that moment often, thinking about how she has to push to keep going, to be educated, to raise her son, to move beyond her life's limitations and do something great.

And pushing is all Precious can do. Her principal expels her early in the novel, ostensibly for falling behind and causing trouble but really for the example she sets by being 16, in 8th grade, and pregnant for the second time.  But she pushes, an ability I find admirable.  I can't imagine the type of person that principal must be to expel a child who so clearly needs help, and as an educator the potential outcome is horrifying. There is so much education can do for someone, and so little that a lack of education does.  But Precious realizes that power -- she articulates her desire for an education and acts on it when she enrolls herself in a new school.  She pushes on, making progress toward changing her life, and that growths comes through clearly as her writing abilities improve and the language becomes more readable.

Sometimes I wish I could find an effective way to teach my students this message about education. It takes more than just someone saying it for teenagers to believe it though; I know, I say it all the time.  Statistics don't help either; there are piles of them out there about how education affects happiness, health, earning power, and more.  But students want something real to tie education and success together, something that overpowers the one-in-a-million chance that, without college, someone can still become Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, a chance many cling to as a reason to avoid school and hope for the best. No doubt, some of them can do it, but not all. I want them to see that, I want them to take the chance education offers for success and a better future. Sadly, I don't think we could read this book in class, but I am hopeful for something similar someday. This book would just be so perfect! The message is so clear, but not overpowering, not fake -- not something that kids would disregard as BS.

Even though the absurdity of the violence, rapes, etc., is anathema to administrators and parents, I think it would help students feel involved and feel the message.  There is so much going on for Precious, so much that connects to students lives.  There are obviously some extremes in this book, but based on the popularity of so many depressing novels (see: Oprah's old Book Club list. Almost every book on that list is super depressing, yet they were are hugely popular at one time or another.) in America today, depressing content pulls on people.. I realize that some students, like mine who are largely privileged, may find this book too much, may find the content too far removed from their realm of understanding. But the pull that others' misfortune holds in our society, coupled with the deep sense of hope that infuses the novel, could pull students in and open up conversations that I can only imagine.  Something about hope, in almost any form, gets readers involved, something my students are not immune to and something I would happily utilize to have these kinds of discussions in my classroom.

Hope does so much for Precious's life, and yet author Sapphire wrote this poor girl no future. There is a twist to this novel, a twist I won't give away, but suffice it to say that Precious had suffered enough before this last blow.  But her ability to overcome continues to amaze.  I'm not sure why the author gave Precious yet another obstacle, but I suspect she did it in order to highlight the mental and emotional strength of her main character.  

Ultimately, the novel is incredibly depressing..   But even so, it is incredibly hard to put down -- I steamrolled through it in about 3-4 hours in one afternoon. I really do not want to see the movie; I'm not sure I can watch that kind of suffering.  Playing it out in my head was bad enough.  Despite this, I think it likely that someday I will see the movie. The actress who plays Precious, Gabourey Sidibe, was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress, an accomplishment all on its own.  That ability tells me the movie is strong, as the novel was carried so much by Precious that the movie must be too.

This novel has a future, and I don't mean its sequel. The overlay of hope is powerful.  This novel resonates with me, helps me understand the plight of the impoverished and illiterate in our country, and makes me want to do something better. I'm already a teacher, so I guess that's a start. A small one, but a start nonetheless.