A wonderful book written and illustrated by Bechdel, it has the strenght to ponder very personal issues in an open and deep way. She tells of her father and of herself up until the time of her father's death when she's in college. She looks back with awareness, combining drawn versions of photos, letters, journals, and memories, realizing in hindsight a deeper understanding of what was going on, of events that were taking place. Towards the end of his life, the family becomes aware that he had been involved with other men, around the same time that she tells her family that she is a lesbian. She states that "(t)here is a certain emotional expedience to claiming him as a tragic victim of homophobia. But that's a problematic line of thought." (p. 196) In fact the whole book wonders about him as a person by looking at the "evidence".

She is also looking back at her own life and childhood, at the same time as looking at her father's. "Or maybe" Bechdel says, "I'm trying to render my sensless personal loss meaningful by linking it, however posthumously, to a more coherent narrative." (p. 196) And indeed she is, in a way that I found very personal and moving. The narrative is the voice of the the present looking back and analyzing, while the voices in the panels combine with the pictures to illustrate what was happening at the time. The drawings are wonderful and expressive, with stunning details. Even when the mouths are little more than a dot, they combine with the eyes, the face and the surroundings to wonderfully illustrate the words, just as Bechdel combines the events in her life, her fathers' and families', and occassionally reaching out to the larger world to form a convergence.

Besides the way she draws and describes herself as a person, I connected with the strong theme of books that connected her with her father, and traces of culture and events of growing up in the 1970s. While there were many words that she used that I didn't know (charybdis, consubstantial) I never had the feeling that I didn't know what she was talking about!