“Fun Home” seems deceptively simple, perhaps because the illustrations are so linear. The five-part structure, which zeroes in on Alison’s family from five different viewpoints while also functioning as a coming-of-age novel, pushes against the limitations of the graphic form. (It’s notable that many of the greatest graphic “novels” are actually memoirs. We remember our childhood as if it were a cartoon.)
One big mystery is why this book was such a mainstream success, beloved by Entertainment Weekly and Time magazine, despite its absolutely homosexual theme (or because of it?). My sense is that family secrets are the biggest shared American theme. All of us pretend to be idealized happy consumers without histories — but we fail. In the painful non-relationship between Alison and her father (one is tempted to call it an “anti-relationship”) each is the other’s complement: he a man 
who wishes he were a girl, she a girl who wants to be a cowboy. Their mutual loneliness is their bond. His mysterious death, simultaneously a suicide and an accident, eats away at the reader the way it haunts Alison. (Is it guilt? Do I feel that I killed him with my own homophobia?)
From “Dykes to Watch Out For” I knew Alison was smart, capable of balancing numerous storylines, but who would have guessed that the long form would liberate her? What is the existential connection between funeral homes, love of literature, house restoration and in-the-closet sexuality? I’m still not sure, but it all adds together perfectly.
The moral of the story: if you’re unusual in any way, move out of your goddamn Pennsylvania town!