Fun Home

"Alison has a strip that’s been running for a long time called Dykes to Watch Out For, but this is an autobiographical book. ‘Fun Home’ is short for the funeral home Alison’s dad ran when she was a child. It’s a book that blew me away and continues to blow me away every time I read it – and I must have read it five or six times by now: probably the best book I’ve read in the past ten years in any genre or form. It’s an incredibly crafted book in which the chapters are not chronological but thematic, and each chapter is keyed to a book that her father loved. So it’s not a book about what happened to her father, a closeted gay man who committed suicide a few months after Alison herself came out when she was 19. It’s about looking through a family archive to try and get a sense of her father’s particularity. She gives the plot away right at the beginning. He jumps backwards in front of a truck on the Pennsylvania highway, and the rest of the book is this incredibly moving, powerful investigation of her own childhood. An adult investigation of a family archive of documents, photographs, diaries, objects, which belonged to her father. She’s searching for his identity; how she can relate to him and where the points of disconnection are. She’s investigating what the lived life of her closeted gay father must have been like. But part of what’s fascinating to me about the book is that she redraws the archival material by hand: the photographs, the letters, the police reports, even her own childhood diaries. When comics are interesting, they’re a hand-made form. That’s the connection between comics and autobiography . On every page of the comic you have an index of the body of the person making it. I think redrawing all these documents gives her a way of going back into her family history and marking it with her own body. It’s an amazing act of self-possession – taking control of the archives, making a shadow archive, mimicking. It’s very much about being a child – what it’s like being a child relating to parents."