I honestly didn’t know what the book was about as I opened it, but its reputation precedes it, and I’ve read Are You My Mother? so really I should have guessed. The book details Alison Bechdel’s relationship with her father, an unsatisfied 12th grade English teacher who loved gardening, Albert Camus, borderline (or not so borderline) trysts with young men, and books.
The narrator does not know about the young men until much later. What comes next though is the eccentricities of her father, the spelling out of his life and character, and the older Alison reading and rereading the same literature he read, sometimes the same copy, to try to better understand the interior life of her father, who clearly held all his closest thoughts and desires to his chest.
The central event or question (outside of the who was this man) of the book is whether or not her father died from an accident or from suicide. He was struck by a passing truck in front of their home, and textual evidence from Camus and her father’s annotations of Camus, plus other details of his life suggest he may well have jumped backward into traffic, but she contends it’s more than possible that he simply was struck by accident.
The book allows for both and the ultimate answer matters little because the fact of his death and his orientation toward existentialism bordering on nihilism and those details matter much much more. Some of the writing here is so so good.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Fun-Home-Tragicomic-Alison-Bechdel/dp/0618871713/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=fun+home&qid=1575044719&s=books&sr=1-2)