Alison Bechdel
Tue., June 26, 7 p.m., Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St.
reading/signing
;)
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It takes reading 13 pages of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Mariner) to know this isn't your typical comic book. "Sometimes, when things were going well, I think my father actually enjoyed having a family," writes the author of the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. "Or at least, the air of authenticity we lent to his exhibit. A sort of still life with children." By the 14th page, you know it isn't your typical graphic novel, either. She continues, "My brothers and I couldn't compete with the astral lamps and girandoles and Hepplewhite suite chairs. They were perfect. I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children and his children like furniture." We learn later that her father — a married man, an English teacher and a funeral director — was gay. Said father was also run over by a Sunbeam Bread truck. Some said it was an accident. Bechdel thinks it was suicide — perhaps, she posits, a suicide precipitated by her own sapphic coming out. Named to top book lists by Time, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, and a host of other pubs, Fun Home courts death with a cavalier hand. Bechdel's coldness toward the subject is both refreshing and unsettling. As a child, she asked gravediggers if she could climb in and play. As an adult, we get the impression she'd ask the same thing. And we can't resist joining her.
Tue., June 26, 7 p.m., free, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, www.library.phila.gov.
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