We're all familiar with the comical representation of dysfunctional families in media. We've got sitcoms like Arrested Development and Modern family, as well as animated comedies like The Simpsons and American Dad. It's not too often that television sheds a realistic light on these types of families, but that's where autobiographical graphic novels come in to fill in the gaps.
Stitches: A Memoir by David Small, and
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel are two graphic novels about each author's youth within their respected dysfunctional families. Although both novels are very different from one another, they do occasionally have parallel themes that relate to growing up with distant parents.
Warning: The next section of this blog contains spoilers for both books, if you want to give them a read, stop here. Again, you've been warned.
Abigail's story revolves around the death of her father, and discovering the family secret that he was actually a homosexual. Unbeknownst to her parents for awhile, Abigail became interested in the same sex in college, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Abigail spends most the novel explaining her relationship with her father beginning from her childhood up until early adulthood. She and her brothers spent a lot of their time helping their parents fix up their Victorian house to its former glory, helping at the family owned funeral home (they called it the
Fun Home), and occasionally going on family vacations with their parents who seemed to care more about their books and theater auditions. The thing that I loved the most about Bechdel's novel was probably the way she revealed her father's interest in young men early and abruptly in the novel. One moment the plot seemed to be linear and flowing well, not quite predictable, but you could catch the early vibes about the novel being about a dysfunctional family. Then BAM, out of nowhere, she not-so-subtlety drops the bombshell that was the father's sexuality. It was so sudden, I had to read the section three times just to make sure that I was reading it right before moving on. Here is the panel in question:
It's much different than the way David Small handled his family's "secret" towards readers, which I will get to here in a second. Bechdel's narration in the book was much more articulated than most graphic novels that I was used to reading. She made several references to books, plays, and movies that I never even heard of. Honestly, it made me feel less intelligent, HOWEVER, anytime I did catch a reference, my confidence got a little boost. The writing style and reveal are quite different than Small's
Stitches.
David's story is mainly centered on the relationship between him and his mother. There are occasional encounters with his father and grandma, but it was his mother that was the center of what made his family dysfunctional. David's mother seemed to have a mental disorder that may had been genetically passed from her mother, or brought upon her by the abuse she received from her unstable mother. Unlike Bechdel's book, the writing style was a bit more simple and the secret was slowly revealed subtly rather than surprisingly thrown at the reader. It was fun to slowly put the pieces together as the story went on, and I absolutely loved the dream sequence at the end of the book. In the end, David's grandma burns a house and the mother dies (this is a super rough summary, a lot more goes on) then David has a dream. In the dream he is in a house by himself, and out a window he sees another building nearby with his grandmother inside and his mother sweeping the path from his house to the building. His dream is essentially a metaphor of his mother paving the way to a mental disorder, but Daivid refuses to follow their footsteps.
In the end, both novels shared stories of their dysfunctional families with major differences, but a few similarities. They both share riveting tales about their childhoods, as well as their troubles with both parents, but with more focus on just one of them. They overcame the issues that their parents had set inadvertently, and both went on to live their regular lives. Art wise, Bechdel's style resonated better with me, but that's because I like sharp drawings rather than watercolor, but Small's simple writing style and parallels to Alice in Wonderland were a bit more intriguing to me. Overall, bother novels are absolutely fantastic reads that I would definitely recommend to friends, family, and colleagues!
