At their best, books are more than just a bound collection of paper and ink –– they are a revelation. In “Fun Home,” the landmark graphic novel memoir, cartoonist Alison Bechdel depicts the moment she stumbled on “Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives,” a collection of interviews with gay men and women where they candidly talk about their lives and decision to come out. Reading through that book at age 19 helped the pieces finally fall into place for Bechdel and have the long-simmering epiphany that she is a lesbian.
For Meg Cassidy, an undergraduate English student at Northeastern University, “Fun Home” was that book. “It introduced me to this new, exciting world and let me know what kind of life was possible for me,” Cassidy says. “Reading about people who felt how you felt, the narrator being able to find words like ‘lesbian’ in the dictionary, these things mean something. You have a word for what you are, language for who you are. They are reminders that you are not alone in this world.”
