The question is always 'what does the form bring to the story being told?'. Reading Fun Home, I found myself noticing that, while the written narration was doing a lot of telling - describing in broad strokes Bechdel's family life growing up in small town Pennsylvania, and especially her father's influence and personality - the illustrations were doing plenty of showing, not just in the literal sense of depicting in pictures what was being described, but also in adding texture, subtext, tone and mood.
Cumulatively, it's unshowy but very effective, with the graphic memoir's several strands coming together neatly but without feeling forced - Bechdel's relationship with her father, her own sexuality as well as his (my one substantial quibble is the way it doesn't directly reckon with the possibility - likelihood maybe - that his closeted homosexuality extended to affairs with teenage boys ... although to have expected that of a memoir of this kind might be unfair), her parents' relationship, the interplay between inner and outer lives, the shapes of families and family relationships, the outsize role of fiction and literature in all of that in her own case. It's at the same time modest and deep.
Cumulatively, it's unshowy but very effective, with the graphic memoir's several strands coming together neatly but without feeling forced - Bechdel's relationship with her father, her own sexuality as well as his (my one substantial quibble is the way it doesn't directly reckon with the possibility - likelihood maybe - that his closeted homosexuality extended to affairs with teenage boys ... although to have expected that of a memoir of this kind might be unfair), her parents' relationship, the interplay between inner and outer lives, the shapes of families and family relationships, the outsize role of fiction and literature in all of that in her own case. It's at the same time modest and deep.
