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''Fun Home'', subtitled ''A Family Tragicomic'', is a 2006 graphic memoir by the American writer Alison Bechdel, author of the comic strip ''Dykes to Watch Out For''. It chronicles the author's childhood and youth in rural Pennsylvania, United States, focusing on her complex relationship with her father. The book addresses themes of sexual orientation, gender roles, suicide, emotional abuse, dysfunctional family life, and the role of literature in understanding oneself and one's family. Writing and illustrating ''Fun Home'' took seven years, in part because of Bechdel's laborious artistic process, which includes photographing herself in poses for each human figure.〔 Print edition only.〕 ''Fun Home'' has been both a popular and critical success, and spent two weeks on the ''New York Times'' Best Seller list. In ''The New York Times Sunday Book Review'', Sean Wilsey called it "a pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics and memoir) in multiple new directions." Several publications named ''Fun Home'' as one of the best books of 2006; it was also included in several lists of the best books of the 2000s. It was nominated for several awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and three Eisner Awards (one of which it won).〔〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=The 2007 Eisner Awards: Winners List )〕 A French translation of ''Fun Home'' was serialized in the newspaper ''Libération''; the book was an official selection of the Angoulême International Comics Festival and has been the subject of an academic conference in France. ''Fun Home'' has been the subject of numerous academic publications in areas such as biography studies and cultural studies, as part of a larger turn towards serious academic investment in the study of comics/sequential art.〔e.g. Tolmie, Jane (2009). "Modernism, Memory and Desire: Queer Cultural Production in Alison Bechdel's ''Fun Home''." ''Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies''. 22: 77-96; Watson, Julia (2008). "(Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel's ''Fun Home'' )." ''Biography''. 31.1: 27-58.〕 ''Fun Home'' also generated controversy: a public library in Missouri removed ''Fun Home'' from its shelves for five months after local residents objected to its contents, and the book's use in universities in Utah and South Carolina has been challenged.〔〔 Bechdel later traced her maternal relationship in ''Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama''. In 2013 a musical adaptation of ''Fun Home'' at The Public Theater enjoyed multiple extensions to its run, with book and lyrics written by Obie Award-winning playwright Lisa Kron, and score composed by Tony Award-nominated Jeanine Tesori. The production, directed by Sam Gold, was called "the first mainstream musical about a young lesbian." As a musical theatre piece, ''Fun Home'' was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, while winning the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Musical, and the Obie Award for Musical Theater.〔〔〔〔 The Broadway production opened in April 2015,〔 and earned an even dozen nominations for the 69th Tony Awards, winning the Tony Award for Best Musical. ==Plot and thematic summary== The narrative of ''Fun Home'' is non-linear and recursive. Incidents are told and re-told in the light of new information or themes. Bechdel describes the structure of ''Fun Home'' as a labyrinth, "going over the same material, but starting from the outside and spiraling in to the center of the story." In an essay on memoirs and truth in the academic journal ''PMLA'', Nancy K. Miller explains that as Bechdel revisits scenes and themes "she re-creates memories in which the force of attachment generates the structure of the memoir itself." Additionally, the memoir derives its structure from allusions to various works of literature, Greek myth and visual arts; the events of Bechdel's family life during her childhood and adolescence are presented through this allusive lens.〔 Miller notes that the narratives of the referenced literary texts "provide clues, both true and false, to the mysteries of family relations."〔 The memoir focuses on Bechdel's family, and is centered on her relationship with her father, Bruce. Bruce Bechdel was a funeral director and high school English teacher in Beech Creek, where Alison and her siblings grew up. The book's title comes from the family nickname for the funeral home, the family business in which Bruce Bechdel grew up and later worked; the phrase also refers ironically to Bruce Bechdel's tyrannical domestic rule. Bruce Bechdel's two occupations are reflected in ''Fun Homes focus on death and literature. In the beginning of the book, the memoir exhibits Bruce Bechdel's obsession with restoring the family's Victorian home.〔 His obsessive need to restore the house is connected to his emotional distance from his family, which he expressed in coldness and occasional bouts of abusive rage.〔〔Bechdel, ''Fun Home'', pp. 11, 18, 21, 68–69, 71.〕 This emotional distance, in turn, is connected with his being a closeted homosexual. Bruce Bechdel had homosexual relationships in the military and with his high school students; some of those students were also family friends and babysitters.〔Bechdel, ''Fun Home'', pp. 58–59, 61, 71, 79, 94–95, 120.〕 At the age of 44, two weeks after his wife requested a divorce, he stepped into the path of an oncoming Sunbeam Bread truck and was killed.〔Bechdel, ''Fun Home'', pp. 27–30, 59, 85.〕 Although the evidence is equivocal, Alison Bechdel concludes that her father committed suicide.〔〔Bechdel, ''Fun Home'', pp. 23, 27–29, 89, 116–117, 125, 232.〕 The story also deals with Alison Bechdel's own struggle with her sexual identity, reaching a catharsis in the realization that she is a lesbian and her coming out to her parents.〔〔Bechdel, ''Fun Home'', pp. 58, 74–81,〕 The memoir frankly examines her sexual development, including transcripts from her childhood diary, anecdotes about masturbation, and tales of her first sexual experiences with her girlfriend, Joan.〔Bechdel, ''Fun Home'', pp. 76, 80–81, 140–143, 148–149, 153, 157–159, 162, 168–174, 180–181, 183–186, 207, 214–215, 224.〕 In addition to their common homosexuality, Alison and Bruce Bechdel share obsessive-compulsive tendencies and artistic leanings, albeit with opposing aesthetic senses: "I was Spartan to my father's Athenian. Modern to his Victorian. Butch to his nelly. Utilitarian to his aesthete."〔Bechdel, ''Fun Home'', p. 15.〕 This opposition was a source of tension in their relationship, as both tried to express their dissatisfaction with their given gender roles: "Not only were we inverts, we were inversions of each other. While I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him, he was attempting to express something feminine through me. It was a war of cross-purposes, and so doomed to perpetual escalation."〔Bechdel, ''Fun Home'', p. 98.〕 However, shortly before Bruce Bechdel's death, he and his daughter have a conversation in which Bruce confesses some of his sexual history; this is presented as a partial resolution to the conflict between father and daughter.〔Bechdel, ''Fun Home'', pp. 220–221.〕 At several points in the book, Bechdel questions whether her decision to come out as a lesbian was one of the triggers for her father's suicide.〔〔Bechdel, ''Fun Home'', pp. 57–59, 86, 117, 230–232.〕 This question is never answered definitively, but Bechdel closely examines the connection between her father's closeted sexuality and her own open lesbianism, revealing her debt to her father in both positive and negative lights.〔〔〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Fun Home」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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