Post #42 – Women’s Memoirs, Book Raves – Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett
Time to Think Outside the Memoir Box
Perhaps I should have called this post: Time to Get Out Your Memoir Drawing Tools. Either way this is a different type of memoir book review.
We usually devote our memoir book reviews to an examination of works that may provide guidance and inspiration for memoir writers. This time, we’ve moved away from traditional narrative memoirs to take a look at the emerging area of graphic memoir.
My eldest son has long been a fan of graphic novels. This probably all started back when he was quite young and I forced a lights out policy at bedtime. Of course, he just took a flashlight to bed with him and read comics under the covers. Little did I know that his fascination would continue long after he had his MBA and was well launched in business.
About a month ago, he called to ask, “Mom, have you read Fun Home?” He knows I’m always reading memoirs and wanted to discuss Alison Bechdel’s memoir that he had just discovered. When I told him I hadn’t, he immediately ordered a copy for me from Amazon and it was on my doorstep in two days. I have several other graphic memoirs and have used them in my classes to show how the range of memoir expression. Usually, graphic memoirs are fairly simple stories so I didn’t expect all that much. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. In fact, the stories and relationships may have been quite complicated. But it seems that in the early graphic memoirs something had to be sacrificed and subtlety as well as complexity were among the elements eliminated.
Enter Fun Home. In the two aspects of this memoir, neither the storytelling nor the drawings have been simplified. This is a coming of age story set in the context of the life and death of Bechdel’s father. He was a high school school teacher, director of the family-owned funeral home (source of the book’s title), and closeted (at least for his children) homosexual. Graphically the book builds on the well-honed skill that the author has refined over the 20 years that she has drawn the comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For.”
The book’s organization keeps the reader on her toes. Rather than following a chronology, the memoir returns to scenes multiple times, drawing out a new element or theme each time.
Little seems to have been left out. The author incorporates time and place:
as well as humor:
Even the pages do not follow a routine set of frames. When Bechdel needs to show a vertical scene, it might occupy half or one-third of the page. On another page there might be three or four or six panels. Even two side-by-side frames may be of slightly different sizes in order to accommodate the amount of text. This makes each page a unique visual experience. But perhaps even more interesting is the way that the text and the drawings do more than just complement or substitute for each other. The combination is more powerful than the sum of the parts, showing the power of the graphic memoir.
