She only ever saw her parents kiss once, and that was just a “chaste peck on the cheek.” In this engaging cartoon-as-memoir, Lambda Award-winning comics artist Bechdel searches through layers of incident and artifact for the truth about her father, a style-conscious, aesthetically inclined funeral-home director (hence the book’s title) and English teacher who was also a closeted gay man having secret affiances with students. An author-bio on the back flap describes Bechdel as “a careful archivist of her own life.” This might turn off some potential readers, feeding as it does into today’s tiresome all-about-me movement. Yet the book’s dry wit, sardonic hyperperceptiveness and lithe line drawings pull you in.
Grade: B