Six Feet in the Closet

www.miamisunpost.com - 2006

Daddy’s got a secret. Actually, Daddy’s got a few of ’em, from the burly boys he’s hired to, er, help around the house, to the babysitter (male, natch) who accompanies the family on a trip to New York. Thing is, living in ’70s Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, Daddy best keep his secrets to himself… or else.

Of course, sneaky secrets like these are better kept in the closet, as is a Daddy like this, who wouldn’t come out till it was way too late.

Thus runs the backstory to Alison Bechdel’s universally lauded graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton Mifflin, $19.95). That Daddy Bruce and daughter Alison come to find they share the love that once dared not speak its name only means the backstory goes right to the forefront.

And center, where things get dead on. For not long after Daddy finds out that Daughter is just like him only different, he steps right in front of a Sunbeam Bakery truck.

OK, so there’s no evidence that Daddy really did do himself in, but Bechdel seems convinced otherwise. To bolster her suspicions, she lays claim to the fact that Daddy dies at 44, the same age as his heavily favorited F. Scott Fitzgerald when he shuffled off this brutally mortal coil.

Call it poetic symmetry.

Bechdel, who’s made quite the career for herself with the wildly syndicated strip series Dykes to Watch Out For, here takes her uncustomary vividry to a whole new depth. And hurt. Drawn, and quartered, this is a reveal so deep, and so personal, that all but the most callow would wince.

Yet Fun is no mere wallow. Draped in the obsessively ornate trappings of the Victorian funeral home from which this tale gets its name, and toned in the nuance of Great Works and Queer Culture, Bechdel lights her heavy with humor and whimsy and candor and keen. In the end, yes, “[i]t’s a comic book, but it’s a sad comic book.” And it’s like no other comic book you’ve ever read before.

Alison Bechdel will be at Books and Books, 933 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach, on Thursday, Sept. 28, at 8 p.m. For more information call 305-532-3222. Presented in collaboration with Design Within Reach Studio and the Miami-Dade Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce.

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