Review: Fun Home

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Author: Alison Bechdel
Pages: 232
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Read: May 18, 2013
Source: Friend's library (since mine didn't have it)

Description from Goodreads:
A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books.

This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form.

Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.

First Sentence: "Like many fathers, mine could occasionally be prevailed on for a spot of 'airplane.'"

Review:

Though this may not have been hugely apparent on my blog, overwhelmed as I am by review copies, I dearly love graphic novels and manga. In an effort to try to fit more of those in, my first selection was Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, an autobiography in graphic novel format. Someone on Twitter recommended this to me (Ceilidh of The Book Lantern, perhaps?), and I convinced my friend to ILL it from her library, since my local library charges for those. In Fun Home, Bechdel confronts her sexual journey and her lingering emotions about her father in a lavishly written, darkly humorous comic.

The title Fun Home comes from the fact that her father ran a funeral home, as well as working as a high school teacher. I could not help but be reminded of the show Six Feet Under, which does have some parallels to Bechdel's life experience, certainly in tone and themes, like homosexuality and a truly fucked up family.

Bechdel's identity as a lesbian woman is tied up with her thoughts of her father. She feels that her butch identity developed in contrast to his own sissy-ness; these words are her own and not mine, by the way. Her sexuality and his death will always be linked in her mind too, because of the circumstances of his demise, though the connection seems tenuous at best. This, though, is how the human mind works, implying causality and taking on guilt where none needs to exist, a negative side effect as seeing ourselves as the center of the universe.

Bechdel tells the story of her coming of age in the 1970s with a big emphasis on literary references. She's definitely appealing to a well-read and educated audience. Having not read Proust or Ulysses, there were numerous references I'm sure that I missed out on, and I imagine the constant use of comparison to literary figures would be frustrating for those unfamiliar with the texts mentioned. I really liked this technique, however, the way that Bechdel set herself apart from her own story and analyzed it like fiction. In fact, she even includes snippets from her diary and her father's letters, considering the hidden meaning within them precisely the way she was skeptical of doing with literature in her college English courses.

Bechdel's writing is gorgeous, complex and drenched in meaning. Both the pictures and the words combine to tell the story. Sometimes in graphic novels, the text takes a back seat to the images, but not here. That every word was carefully chosen is obvious. I just loved her writing and had to sit back and chew on some of the sentences, because they were just so beautiful.

Autobiographies and biographies have been one of those forms of writing I've never had much interest in, but Fun Home was fascinating, so I may have been too hasty to dismiss them. My friend who borrowed the book for me said Bechdel also wrote one about her mother, who's a secondary character here, so I'll have to check that out.

Rating: 4/5

Favorite Quote: "Sometimes, when things were going well, I think my father actually enjoyed having a family. Or, at least, the air of authenticity we lent to his exhibit. A sort of still life with children."

Audiobook Review: Bossypants

Bossypants

Author: Tina Fey
Narrator: Tina Fey
Duration: 5 hrs, 35 mins
Publisher: Hachette Audio
Source: Library

Description from Goodreads:
Before Liz Lemon, before "Weekend Update," before "Sarah Palin," Tina Fey was just a young girl with a dream: a recurring stress dream that she was being chased through a local airport by her middle-school gym teacher. She also had a dream that one day she would be a comedian on TV.

She has seen both these dreams come true.

At last, Tina Fey's story can be told. From her youthful days as a vicious nerd to her tour of duty on Saturday Night Live; from her passionately halfhearted pursuit of physical beauty to her life as a mother eating things off the floor; from her one-sided college romance to her nearly fatal honeymoon—from the beginning of this paragraph to this final sentence.

Tina Fey reveals all, and proves what we've all suspected: you're no one until someone calls you bossy.

Review:

Tina Fey's Bossypants pretty much swept every category it was part of in the Audie Awards. As such, I had pretty incredibly high expectations, only made higher by my immense respect for Tina Fey. I love 30 Rock and think she's hilarious. Imagine my disappointment to find that I really feel meh about her audiobook, even though I got to listen to her reading it to me.

Basically, I just didn't find this particularly funny, even though it's clearly intended to be. The funniest part was probably one of the included SNL sketches. I maybe laughed out loud once or twice. Two of the five discs not only didn't made me laugh, but irritated me. I guess it felt a bit like Fey was trying too hard, and the end result wasn't funny.

Bossypants would have benefited from more of a distinct narrative ARC. Despite the title, it's not really about leadership or work, though it pretends to be. It's more like an overview of chapters of Tina Fey's life. When she switches from one topic to another, there is no transition. It's just BOOM we're talking about this now. It's very distracting and uneven. The topics basically break down like this:

Disc 1: Scenes from Tina's Youth
Disc 2: Improv
Disc 3: SNL
Disc 4: 30 Rock
Disc 5: Babies

Learning more about the inner works of the entertainment industry interested me, so the middle of the audiobook was enjoyable enough. That last disc basically made me want to hurl the audiobook out the window, but then I would have had to pay the library for it, and that shit's expensive. I kid you not that the ENTIRE last disc was about babies and breast milk. If you made a list of things that I have no interest in those would be near the top with football and hearing about old people's medical problems.

Keeping this short, rather than being a bigger Tina Fey fan at the end of this audiobook, I'm less interested in her than I was. Tons of people have loved this, though, so who knows. Maybe if you'd not placed Tina Fey on a nerd goddess pedestal it's better.

Rating: 2.5/5

Audiobook Review: Have Mother, Will Travel

Have Mother, Will Travel: A Mother and Daughter Discover Themselves, Each Other, and the World

Author: Claire Fontaine & Mia Fontaine
Narrators: Claire Fontaine & Mia Fontaine
Duration: 10 hrs, 29 mins
Publisher: Harper Audio
Publication Date: July 17, 2012
Source: Own

Description from Goodreads:
A mother, a daughter, and a life-changing adventure around the world . . .

Their bestselling memoir, "Come Back," moved and inspired readers with the story of Mia Fontaine's harrowing drug addiction and her mother, Claire's, desperate and ultimately successful attempts to save her. Now it's a decade later and Claire and Mia each face a defining moment in her life, and a mother-daughter relationship that has frayed around the edges. At fifty-one, Claire's shed her identity as Mia's savior but realizes that, oops, she forgot to plan for life after motherhood; Mia, twenty-five and eager to step outside her role as recovery's poster child, finds adult life isn't all it's cracked up to be. Determined to transform themselves and their relationship once again, the pair sets off on a five-month around-the-world adventure.

What awaits them is an extraordinary, often hilarious journey through twenty cities and twelve countries--one that includes mishaps, mayhem, and unexpected joys, from a passport-eating elephant to a calamitous camel ride around the Pyramids--and finally making peace with their tumultuous past in the lavender fields of France, where they live for the last four months of the trip. Seeing how self-possessed and community-minded twentysomethings are in other countries broadens Mia's perspective, helping her grow, and grow up. Claire uses the trip to examine her broken relationship with her own mother, a Holocaust survivor, and to create a vision for her second act. Watching her mom assess half a century of life, Mia comes to know her as Claire has always known Mia--as all mothers know their daughters--better than anyone else, and often better than themselves.

Wiser for what they've learned from women in other cultures, and from each other, they return with a deepened sense of who they are and where they want to go--and with each embracing the mature friendship they've discovered and the profound love they share.

Alternating between Claire and Mia's compelling and distinct voices, "Have Mother, Will Travel" is a testament to the power and beauty of the mother-daughter relationship, one that illuminates possibilities for our own lives.

Review:

Much as I love the books I read and it should be pretty evident from all of this blogging business that I really, really do, sometimes I worry that I'm becoming too set in my ways and not exploring genres and such enough. Well, in Have Mother, Will Travel, I ventured into an almost entirely new genre for me: the memoir. Sure, I've read a couple, like The Glass Castle, which I am one of the only people in the world not to like, but, mostly, I've avoided them. Thankfully, I have been rewarded for my exploration and open-mindedness; I was surprised how much I enjoyed this, even though the topic, mother-daughter bonding, sort of made me want to run for the hills.

What I learned early on is that this is actually a continuation of some sorts from mother Claire and daughter Mia's first book together, Come Back, which focused on Mia's self-destructive teen years and her mother's efforts to save her. There's no need to read Come Back before going into this book, though I did add it to my reading list after enjoying this one. I was not confused, but I suspect there's plenty to be learned from that one as well.

The framing of this memoir was months of world-wide travel embarked upon by Claire and Mia, as an effort to bond again, having lost their closeness to the regular troubles of life in their different cities. Knowing this, I sort of expected everything to be light and fluffy, but both Claire and Mia are still dealing with the long-lasting effects of the traumas covered in greater detail in Come Back. Mia was sexually abused by her father when she was a child, and after she turned her life around after her drug-addled teen years, she and her mother became advocates to help abused daughters and their mothers. This isn't an issue I'd really ever heard discussed, so I learned a lot and found it very powerful emotionally.

Of course, what I hated about The Glass Castle was how boring and whiny it felt to me, as well as the tone of superiority Walls seemed to have about being well-off now while her parents dug through the dumpster for food. (Sorry if you liked that book but it just rubbed me the wrong way). The Fontaines didn't come off that way to me at all. They do not seem to feel particularly superior, are very willing to detail their personal faults and foibles, incredibly honest about the dark things, but also quite funny. The book maintains a balance between serious discussion and navel-gazing, and humorous travel book.

The first half of Have Mother, Will Travel describes a whirlwind tour of myriad countries as part of a scavenger hunt vacation. Can I say how much I want to go on this trip, even though there's no way in hell I would be able to complete most of the challenges? It just seems like such a great way to structure your vacation. Anyway, I don't want to go into this in too much detail, but the descriptions of the countries visited made me want to travel really badly. This is an excellent book for making you feel wanderlust.

The most important focus of this book, though, is not the travel, but the relationship between mothers and daughters, and, more generally, women. Claire and Mia, from their two different perspectives, do a lot of thinking about their personal relationship, looking at where it's gone wrong and how they can grow closer. They also consider the different family roles they see as they travel, considering which is best. They made me think a lot about myself as a daughter and as a woman, and I do plan on making my mom listen to this as well, even though I suspect some of Claire's observations will make her cry. Given that Mia is about my age and my mom is a baby-boomer like Claire, a lot of their observations hit close to home.

This isn't a book I see having much, if any, appeal for males, because much of it deals strongly with what it means to be a woman. There is some repetition, but, mostly, I was incredibly impressed with this.

Rating: 4/5

Narration:
I cannot imagine this being anywhere near as delightful if I'd read it. Claire and Mia did their own narration, reading their different sections. They both have good, distinctive reading voices, full of personality. Hearing their thoughts in their voices made the memoir, already very personal, feel much more so.

Rating: 4/5

Overall Rating: 4/5