Alison Bechdel, OC ’81, did not have what one would call an average childhood. In her recently published graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, comics depict what it was like living in the old Victorian house that was both her closeted gay father’s pet restoration project and the family business: a funeral home.

Bechdel’s best-selling novel came out this spring. The New York Times calls it “an engrossing memoir that does the graphic novel format proud. The tale — about Ms. Bechdel’s childhood, her father’s death and their shared homosexuality — is painfully honest and richly detailed in words and images.”

 “It was a story that I felt I really needed to tell. I felt sort of obligated to tell it,” said Bechdel in an interview with the Review.

But many of the events crucial to the story happened here at Oberlin, when Bechdel wrote a letter to her parents telling them that she was a lesbian. Already a difficult task, her confession prompted her father to come out as well, revealing and confirming that he, still married to Bechdel’s mother, had been with men. Four months later, her father was hit by a truck crossing the street, an event that has been since described as suicide.

Bechdel believes that her announcement may have caused her father’s death by disturbing the careful balance Bruce Bechdel had achieved between his home life and his homosexuality.

“I didn’t manage to fit this into my book, but another piece of evidence in support of the theory that my dad killed himself was the fact that he’d pretty much completed restoring the house at the time he died. As if, perhaps, now that he was finished with this project, he was finished, period,” she told the Times in August.

Only now, in 2006, has Bechdel been able to chronicle the drama from years past using the medium she knows so well: cartoons. Although Bechdel emphasizes the fact that she had no real agenda when writing the memoir, she said, “I think I wanted to show anecdotal evidence of the real impact homophobia has on people.”

An alternative press cartoonist, Bechdel has a strip called “Dykes to Watch Out For,” a comic printed widely in newspapers and magazines. The comic follows the soap opera lives of its characters, while bringing in current affairs whenever possible.

“I live the same kind of life as the characters in my work,” said Bechdel, when asked if the strip was autobiographical.

While here at Oberlin, Bechdel began to explore expression through drawing.

“I always drew silly pictures in my sketch book,” she said.

In addition, she would create T-shirt designs and apply her creative skills in other constructive ways.

But the professor that Bechdel feels most influenced her work was not in the art department. Stanford Shepard, who has since passed away, taught Bechdel lessons in linguistics and surrealism that helped her to collect her thoughts.

“It would just be an odyssey every day, you never knew what was going to happen,” said Bechdel. “He would tie things together from very disparate fields.”

Although Bechdel did not begin to draw “Dykes to Watch Out For” until two years after her graduation, she believes that the Oberlin College experience has to a certain extent helped shape her thoughts and ideas conveyed in the strip.

Bechdel will return to campus next Wednesday, Oct. 4, to give a lecture on Fun Home. The talk will be held in Craig Lecture Hall at 4:30 p.m.