House of Fun

Growing up in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was anything but. Bechdel’s graphic novel illustrates her life in a small town with her emotionally distant parents: mother a frustrated community-theater actress and father a high-school English teacher, funeral director and historical archivist. He was also a closeted gay man who conducted affairs with babysitters and his students, and who died tragically in an apparent suicide.

While the book has garnered accolades everywhere from the pages of the New York Times to Publishers Weekly, Bechdel did experience some consequences.

“Fun Home got banned from a library in Missouri. That was kind of exciting,” she says. “Other than that, the backlash has been mostly personal — some family fallout. But that seems to be settling down, too.

“It was very hard to draw myself and my family,” notes Bechdel. “I’m not good at caricatures of real people in general, and drawing people I’m so close to was quite challenging. Drawing my dad’s corpse, for example. Drawing the grille of the truck that hit him — that was pretty intense. I spent an inordinate amount of time standing in front of tractor trailers, taking reference shots and imagining what it would be like to see this thing coming at me at sixty miles an hour.”

The resulting book examines the complex relationship with her father — both her anger toward and identification with a person with whom she shared blood, an obsessive-compulsive personality, a love of literature and a sexual identity, one she ultimately learned to accept and celebrate in a way that her father could not.

Join in the family dysfunction tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Tattered Cover LoDo, 1628 16th Street, when Bechdel will discuss and sign her book. For more information, visit www.tatteredcover.com.