This might be the best graphic novel I've ever read, and possibly one of the best books. The writing is fluid and melodic, the sketches are expressive and charming, and the story itself is genuine and witty as only a biography can be.

Fun Home is both a story about Alison Bechdel's childhood home, and about her father, who died of a rumored suicide during her first years at college. It's broken up into seven chapters, but the timeline isn't as sequential as one might expect from the story of someone's life. Instead, each chapter is themed, and Bechdel manages to jump around within her life without ever losing the narrative thread of each theme. In one chapter she'll let us peek into the window of her father's business, a funeral home. In another, she'll show us the bond of their shared love of literature and how it, despite their strange relationship, brought them together. It's remarkable that she's able to weave in and out of time so deftly without losing the reader, and I've never seen it done as well in or out of the graphic novel genre.

And when I say that her relationship with her father is strange, I suppose I'm not giving full credit to it. Early in the first chapter, we learn that Alison's father slept with younger men and had been doing so for years. It's never implied that he is gay necessarily, but that he isn't completely straight, and not even Alison knows in the end whether he preferred men, women, or a healthy mix of the two. The three children fathered would suggest the latter, despite a rocky marriage. The way Bechdel describes her father is familiar. There is anger in it, and love, and confusion, and even a margin of respect. It's how many of us might describe our dads, and goes to show that even in the murkiest of circumstances that humans are all quite connected.

Also central to the plot and narrative of Bechdel's life is the realization that she is a lesbian that comes during her college years and not long before her father's death. The book isn't about Bechdel's sexual preference, at least not completely. It's a driving force, and we see her transform from someone shy about her beliefs and desires into someone comfortable with them. Perhaps more interesting is the dynamic this creates with her father, someone who never was comfortable with his own desires and choices, and the strain of communication that she tries to breach with him.

You could easily say that this book isn't so much a biography about Alison Bechdel as it is a biography about Bruce Bechdel, but really it's the story of a family, and growing up, and the relationship between a father and a daughter who probably never got the time they needed to really know one another. And where most graphic novels might steal a reader's imagination and fill in some blanks for them, this autobiographical look into the Bechdel household only further cements the charm and oddity of a strange confluence of lives. It's a beautiful experience.