Fun Home on Stage

I was excited to see the Fun Home play because I wanted to see how a graphic memoir would translate to stage. I've see picture books as plays, and other "classics" like Peter Pan and Lord of the Flies. But for some reason it wrinkled my brain to imagine the little boxes of a graphic memoir on stage.

It wasn't until after I saw the play that I broke it down further in my mind and thought about how it was a graphic memoir - based on real life, so of course it would easily transfer to a play, because the action was done by real people in the first place.

I did love how it was done, though. The artist Alison Bechdel stood at her art table and watched the action of younger Alisons interacting with her family. After something happened, she would say "Caption..." and brainstorm possible explanations to put with her drawings.

I wasn't a huge fan of the songs. They were gorgeous but I think there was so much action and emotion to explore in the story itself without it being turned into a musical. That being said, the kids' song about the funeral home was definitely my favorite part of the night!

Fun Home

Fun Home: a Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

This is a graphic novel about a girl who finds out her father is gay only after she comes out as a lesbian. He dies shortly after, and she remembers her strange relationship with him, as well as her childhood growing up in and around funeral homes. There could have been a lot more emotion to the story, but I think telling it as a graphic novel kind of diminished that possibility. The drawings didn’t add much depth or insight, but it would have been a sparse story without them.

I've also read Are You My Mother? by Bechdel and had a similar reaction regarding the emotion in the book. I can see how both books were therapeutic for Bechdel to write and illustrate, but I didn't get much of that from the drawings or even the story. They were both interesting, but dragged a bit with the navel-gazing, heavy literary references, and other stuff that could have been cut out to make a snappy, impactful graphic novel.

Fun Home is going to be performed as a play at Playhouse on the Square in May, so I'm excited to see how it translates to the stage. If you've read much of this blog at all, you know I love comparing books to movies and play versions of themselves, so we'll see how Fun Home turns out!

Best Graphic Novels Read in 2016

I felt like I read a lot of graphic novels this year. More than previous years, because I didn’t really think I liked graphic novels at one point. I also felt like I read a lot of great graphic novels this year, but only 4 stood out to me, so I don’t have a full top 5 for this category.

In order from most recently published to oldest:

Awkward by Svetlana Chmakova (2015). This is a middle grade graphic novel about a girl who is nervous about attending a new school, and fails to follow the rules she made for herself to fit in. Peppi joins the art club but can’t bring herself to speak up and share her ideas, and can’t bring herself to apologize to the boy she hurt on the first day. This is one of the most developed stories I’ve read in graphic novel form, and I’ve been recommending it to a lot of young readers in the library.

Roller Girl by Victoria Jamieson (2015). Another middle grade graphic novel (I’m seeing a trend…) about 12-year-old Astrid who finds a new hobby in roller derby. She expects her best friend to come along with her, since they’ve always done everything together, but instead they are growing apart. Loved this book, and can’t wait to read more by Jamieson. The story was really compelling, and the illustrations are gorgeous. Check out my rave review in A BOOK A MINUTE.

Honor Girl by Maggie Thrash (2015). I really loved this graphic memoir - the story was really compelling, even if the art wasn’t the best. That was before I learned that the author isn’t an artist - she taught herself to draw just to tell this story! It’s basically her coming out story - how she fell in love with a girl at summer camp and realized she was a lesbian. I rave a bit more about this book here.

Same Difference by Derek Kirk Kim (2011). I love graphic memoirs, and this is a great moment in time, with flashbacks showing how much small things can stick with you through the years. It was a great story, but I also really appreciated how much it made me think of small moments in my own life that related to a bigger picture. A quick read, but I really recommend it, especially if you like reflecting on your own life. (Does that sound narcissistic?)

Honor Girl

Honor Girl is a compelling graphic memoir that you will want to finish in one sitting, so be warned. Graphic memoirs just might be my favorite type of "graphic" book, like El Deafo by Cece Bell, Smile by Raina Telgemeier, and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.


Maggie has always gone to the same girls' camp every summer, but during her fifteenth summer, she falls in love. With a girl. (Because it's a girls' camp.) Maggie is shocked to find this vital piece of information she didn't know about herself, and spends the summer trying to deal with her feelings. The book is framed by seventeen-year-old Maggie looking back at the summer.

Besides the main storyline of coming out to herself, the side stories in this book are wonderfully, and completely embody the timeless feeling of summer camp. I loved the book for the story, because the people looked a little too much like anime drawings for me to relate to, but then I looked more into Maggie Thrash herself.

It turns out, she isn't an artist at all. She wanted to share the story of her fifteenth summer and coming out, but didn't want to tell it in a traditional way, so she decided to try making it a graphic novel. She looked up illustrations of people and trees and kept practicing until hers looked good. From an interview with MTV:

It’s sort of important to me to let kids know you don’t have to have art school cred to do this. Just do it. Anyone can do it. Not to devalue the medium, but don’t be intimidated by it. Just try it.

Also worth sharing are her thoughts on diversity in young adult fiction:

I’m really excited for the day when you can no longer presume that the protagonist is straight, or that they’re white, or that they have all their arms and legs. There’s this unwritten rule that the protagonist has to be a tabula rasa for you to be able to relate to them, and that a tabula rasa equals straight, equals white, and just that — it needs to, and everyone wants to, be able to relate to other kinds of protagonists and other kinds of stories.