One might expect a graphic narrative to be lean, wry, linear. Yet the pioneering triumph of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is that it’s resonantly rich in thought and theme, nuanced in its framing and feeling, contrapuntal in its treatment of chronology, character, and incident. Bechdel imbues her story with an expressive pulse that moves from words to pictures and back again like an intricate melody passed between the instruments of a string quartet. The memoir is the story of a pre-adolescent girl with two brothers who comes to certain realizations about herself and her family. A labyrinthine web of literary echoes and mythological invocations capture the emerging complexity of her intelligence, and you have to read her images with as much attention as her allusive, probing, and alert prose. More than metaphorically, it’s a handmade book, and lived time is layered into every panel.
Love this book! Hats off to the author, who has entered the cultural vocabulary with the term "the Bechdel Test." Here are the criteria for passing it: the film must "feature at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The requirement that the two women must be named is sometimes added."(Wikipedia)
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