A Classical Education
Abel Reyes | May 27, 2026
“Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence streaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwoods, polishing the finials ... smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.”
Here, then, you have Alison Bechdel’s first graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, distilled to a few sentences. Or rather, something like its pressure point. It is tempting to say that this is Fun Home in miniature, where presence and absence braided so tightly they become indistinguishable, the living body already spectral, the ache arriving before the loss. Or perhaps this passage better resembles Bechdel’s attempt at explanation, at thesis:
“I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.”
