Alison Bechdel, speaking from her home in Burlington, Vt., and appearing Thursday at Books & Books, Miami Beach, has clearly touched readers. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton Mifflin, $19.95) is a riveting visual and verbal guide to a repressed household in Lock Haven, Pa., where Bechdel, now 46, grew up with two brothers and English-teacher parents. Her father, "an alchemist of appearance, a Daedalus of decor," devoted himself to restoring their Gothic-revival house. He was equally passionate about James Joyce, gardening and design. He was also gay, Bechdel learned shortly after coming out to her parents, a deeply closeted man who had affairs, even with the family's teenage babysitter. He was possibly suicidal. Clearing brush one day, he was struck and killed by a Sunbeam bread truck, dying, like his literary hero F. Scott Fitzgerald, at 44. It is exactly that bittersweet longing for connection that suffuses Fun Home, which floats between Bechdel's melancholic sense of estrangement and mordant humor ('If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust"). The book, gorgeously drawn, is a wonderland, brimming with references to Greek mythology, Colette, Ulysses and other literary marvels. Bechdel, who has drawn the hilarious, politically charged comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For since 1983, reproduces her parents' letters -- "I'd be a terrible forger" -- and her childhood diary entries. Against the backdrop of the 1970s, the book also focuses on Bechdel's childhood obsessive/compulsive disorder and her apprehensive, then giddy discovery that she was a lesbian, something she later used to bond with her elusive dad.