Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel [spoilers]

A graphic novel memoir about..... many dark things, and trying to wrestle with them.

The author reveals early on that her funeral-director father committed suicide and, um, had relations with teenage boys. Multiple times she winds and unwinds their story: her lesbianism, his homosexuality, his suicide, his relations with teenage boys.

On the one hand: really a beautiful novel, and an interesting one, it's doing something different, and if I didn't always love the creative choices, I respected that the author was making a choice.

On the other hand: look, at one point the author finds a photo her father took of one of the teenage boys, her babysitter, sleeping and undressed. Bechdel says that
1) the photograph is beautiful, but
2) if this was a 17 year old girl instead she would be deeply disturbed.

She never really digs deeper into this, and it's kind of wild to me that this book just glides past that. At one point her dad gets tried in court for "giving alcohol to a minor", with the strong implication that the alcohol was just a cover for the court, that everyone understood he did something sexual with the boy (and his brother) as well. We... just.... gloss past that?

I don't know what to say, I think this is bad. I think a grown man should not have sex with teenagers. I think a high-school teacher (did I mention he was a high school teacher?) should not have sex with their students. I'm here all day for the messy complication of human affairs, but I don't think you can gloss over this particular thing, and it disturbs me that none of the reviews I can find seem to be fussed about that?