Alison Bechdel's Family Life? Tragicomic

Alison Bechdel puts elements of a difficult childhood into her art.

A look at Bechdel's artwork in Fun Home

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Comic strip artist Alison Bechdel writes and illustrates the comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For.

She has now created a memoir in comic strip form that revisits her youth and her relationship with her sometimes distant father, Bruce, a high school English teacher.

The two often had trouble communicating, and they talked about literature as a way to relate. Her father died when she was almost twenty, an incident she believes was a suicide.

The setting for most of the memoir is a large, Gothic revival house, a home that caused Bechdel to identify with The Addams Family.