Searchers- Fun Home and other disturbing families in graphic novels

When I first saw Fun Home on the syllabus, I mistook it for another novel revolving around a daughter and father called Daddy’s Girl.  Daddy’s Girl  is an incredibly disturbing, semi-auto-biographical, account of incest. It originally ran as a strip in New York Press in the 90’s, and was published in 1995. It won the Ignatz Award, fell out of print, but is now available in hard back form as of 2008, a testament to the power of the story.  The author’s family unfortunately completely denies any abuse took place, but Dreschler’s sister who witnessed most of the abuse (although was not abused herself) acts as a witness to the veracity of the author’s story. Her parents, and the rest of her family except for her one sister, stopped speaking to her after the strip was published. The strips feature the protagonist “Lily” being sexually abused on a nightly basis by her father while her sister pretends to sleep. Lily’s father makes her feel guilty about the abuse (as many abusers do, tragically layering guilt onto the pain of the abuse itself) and she feels that she is the “seducer” and tries to protect her mother from the truth, although it’s suggested throughout the novel that her mother may be aware of it.  The second part of the novel features a girl named “Franny” who is raped by a drug dealer in the woods, and then becomes consumed with guilt and shame for placing herself in the situation that resulted in the attack. Both protagonists are vulnerable girls (Franny is the lonely, new girl in town, desperate to make friends) suffering at the hands of older, male abusers. There are some parallels between Fun Home and Daddy’s Girl in the exploration of the relationship between father’s and daughters, how painful the truth can be, the denial of dysfunction and the desperation to appear normal to the outside world.

Just to be clear, this book is very graphic and very disturbing.  I felt nauseated reading it, and you can’t easily shake the dirty feeling away after the book ends.

http://talkingwithtim.com/wordpress/2008/04/28/debbie-drechsler-on-daddys-girl/   Interview with author from 2008 when the book was re-printed.

Another better interview, from Vice from 1996 when the strips first came out  http://www.viceland.com/blogs/en/2006/05/22/ten-years-ago-in-vice-daddys-little-slut/#more-4407