Arts & Culture
O’BRIEN | On Duke Freshman and Fun Home
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Alison Bechdel’s memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic has been on my radar a lot lately. I first learned of it after watching the Tonys over the summer, and it was subsequently on my list of Broadway plays to see (and books to read). So when I arrived at school this fall, I was excited to see that Fun Home is actually on the booklist of one of the English classes I am taking this semester. The 2006 book is a graphic novel about Bechdel’s childhood with her controlling father, and her gradual realization that she is gay — and so is he. But Fun Home has been in the headlines this past week not because the publicity around the Broadway rendition is making people like me discover the brilliant memoir, but because some Duke freshmen are boycotting reading Fun Home for the school’s freshman summer reading project (and, I’m assuming, passing up the opportunity to see the author speak about the book at their school) on the grounds that it violates their morality.