Currently reading "The Three Junes" by Julia Glass, "The Lonely Polygamist" by Brady Udall and the graphic novel "Fun Home" by Alison Bechdel. Loving all three.
Junes is excellent writing, great characterization, love the use of language, a gifted writer. I keep turning pages when I should be putting out the light at night.
Polygamist is sad, poignant, hilarious, the story of a very large family told through perspectives of the father, a most reluctant polygamist who can't cope with it all, one of his lonely, misunderstood sons who misses his own mother and needs some loving and one of the wives who had hoped for better than this and really just wants a child of her own, one who might survive her miscarriages and pregnancies. It is a very interesting book and it engages you even if you are a rabid anti-polygamist. There is something to be learned by reading about things we hate on principle and the book is about real people muddling their way through this experience, not about politics. Udall is a talented writer.
Fun Home is an autobiographical look at Alison and her relationship with her father. She tells the story of growing up with an emotionally distant father who passed as heterosexual and she doesn't find out from her mother that he is gay until she herself comes out to her parents. She navigates the emotions she went through as a child and teen, chafing against her father's attempts to make her turn out straight. And did I mention that her father was an English teacher besotted with the literary greats who saw himself as a misunderstood Gatsby, loved to restore their Victorian mansion and also ran a funeral home? They called the funeral home The Fun Home. So, did her father die of negligence while crossing the road or did he wilfully step in front of the truck? And if it were suicide, what would that mean for Alison's own incipient sense of self and homosexuality?
All three are excellent books. Recommended!
Clare
