CONTEMPORARY FICTION SEMINAR Thursday September 23rd 6-730 pm Birkbeck, room 633, 6th floor main building, Torrington Square Session to be led by Sam McBean (Birkbeck MPhil/PhD student) Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel (Chapter 4, ‘In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower’) Family Frames: Photography, Narratives, and Postmemory, Marianne Hirsch (‘Introduction’) Described as equal parts künstlerroman, psychoanalytic case study, and literary criticism, Fun Home is a queer memoir as graphic novel that draws on the artist/author’s own complicated experiences of growing up a lesbian with a closeted homosexual father. Blurring the line between comics and autobiography, Bechdel folds into the narrative a wealth of allusions from The Addams Family, modernist literature, and classical mythology. The result is a complex meditation on memory, sexuality, and family. If people have time they might want to also read chapter 3 from Fun Home, ‘That Old Catastrophe’, and check out Bechdel’s website for some of her earlier work. For people who are even keener, we recommend reading the whole book. Fun Home can be picked up in the graphic novel section in Waterstones, Blackwells, and Foyles, and should be available in any good public library. There are also single copies in Birkbeck and KCL libraries. Post-session drinks and chat as usual in the Institute of Education bar. For further details contact Zara Dinnen and Tony Venezia ([log in to unmask]) – or visit our group page at http://dandelionnetwork.org/group/contemporaryfictiongroup for copies of the reading materials.