Reading Fun Home was a fascinating experience. I have seen the musical adapted from this graphic novel (actually memoir) three times, and I also read collections of Bechdel's comics Dykes to Watch Out For back when I was a teenager and figuring out why her work resonated so deeply with me. So reading this book was deeply familiar from the very first page.
But it was also new, and unexpected, and it left me with an even greater appreciation for what an incredible adaptation the musical really is, because it is both unerringly faithful to the book and its own unique narrative. It's not just that there are parts of the book that aren't a part of the musical, although of course that's true, it's that the story changes with the form, and the relationship that theater (and musical theater in particular) has to its audience is different than the one an author has with their reader.
Bechdel uses so many different lenses to examine her father's life, and her relationship with him, and her future beyond him: the shared (yet tragically separate) sense of being an outsider, of queerness, their relationship and connection through literature and using the words of fiction and other people's experiences as a bridge between themselves, the use of design and art and maps, so many maps, to attempt to explain the unfathomable. She also shows how her own diaries attempted desperately to tell the story of her family in a way that made sense, either by omission or by telling the factual truth and avoiding all the emotion underneath. It's a brilliant, beautiful book.
Grade: A
But it was also new, and unexpected, and it left me with an even greater appreciation for what an incredible adaptation the musical really is, because it is both unerringly faithful to the book and its own unique narrative. It's not just that there are parts of the book that aren't a part of the musical, although of course that's true, it's that the story changes with the form, and the relationship that theater (and musical theater in particular) has to its audience is different than the one an author has with their reader.
Bechdel uses so many different lenses to examine her father's life, and her relationship with him, and her future beyond him: the shared (yet tragically separate) sense of being an outsider, of queerness, their relationship and connection through literature and using the words of fiction and other people's experiences as a bridge between themselves, the use of design and art and maps, so many maps, to attempt to explain the unfathomable. She also shows how her own diaries attempted desperately to tell the story of her family in a way that made sense, either by omission or by telling the factual truth and avoiding all the emotion underneath. It's a brilliant, beautiful book.
Grade: A
No comments:
Post a Comment