Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

by Bechdel, Alison
ISBN: 9780618871711
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Used - Trade Paperback - 9780618871711

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Overview

A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books.

This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form.

Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.
  • Format: TradePaperback
  • Author: Bechdel, Alison
  • ISBN: 9780618871711
  • Condition: Used
  • Dimensions: 8.90 x 0.70
  • Number Of Pages: 240
  • Publication Year: 2007

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  • A raw memoir about a dysfunctional family.

    Samantha M. - 1 year 1 month ago

    I picked up this book on a whim and fell in love with it fast. Alison's self reflection of her childhood comes out in a very blunt way. She's not sugarcoating anything, and she goes very in depth on her father and the type of person he was. Disgusted and frustrated with him most of the time, Alison writes about their fights, their striking similarities, and the moments that connected them. I also believe this is drawn in a very clear manner! First time graphic novel readers should be able to follow this book easily!

    HPB Staff Review

  • Beautiful and moving graphic memoir

    Lauren S. - 1 year 6 months ago

    I don't claim to be a graphic novel expert. In fact, Fun Home is only the second in the illustrated genre I've ever read. But I do love a good memoir, the more painful and heart wrenching the better. Alison Bechdel delivers this and more in her brilliant graphic autobiography Fun Home. Bechdel, best known for her hilarious comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, explores her relationship with her emotionally unavailable (and closeted homosexual) father with wry humor and a tinge of regret. Her illustrations are brutal and honest, yet beautiful in their complexity. Bechdel and her father shared a love of literary classics, the language of which has seeped into Bechdel's vernacular - so keep a dictionary handy! Fun Home, though serious in subject matter, is a quick read, but I know I will keep coming back to it again and again. I can't recommend this memoir strongly enough.

    HPB Staff Review

  • A Brilliant Graphic Memoir about a Dysfunctional Family

    Kyle S. - 4 years 8 months ago

    Allison Bechdel's Fun Home represents graphic novels and memoirs at their finest. Her story is told in a non-linear fashion between Bechdel growing up in rural Pennsylvania with her parents and siblings at the 'Fun Home' (their nickname for the family funeral home) and Oberlin College; the primary setting for Bechdel's sexual awakening. The memoir focuses on Bechdel unraveling and making sense of her own sexuality and gender with and without the context of her father, a task that is much harder than initially believed. Early on readers discover that Bechdel's father divorces his wife later in life, outs himself as gay and only a short time later dies in what may have been a suicide. Bechdel ties in the themes of a dysfunctional family, a coming of age story, and her queerness in an artistic and seamless fashion. Fun Home, one of the best books of the 2000s, is often read in college-level women's studies and LGBT+ courses and was recently adapted into a Tony award-winning musical in 2015.

    HPB Staff Review

  • Cartoonist explores family relationships and queerness after father's death

    Mega R. - 7 years 6 months ago

    Fun Home was the first graphic memoir I ever read, and it's still my favorite. Shortly after coming out to her family, Alison Bechdel receives news of her father's passing and also learns from her mother that he was gay. Through her illustrations and writing, Bechdel portrays the difficulty of growing up and growing into herself as a lesbian while her father tries to tame her masculine tendencies and make her more traditionally feminine. This is an excellent book for anyone within the LGBTQIA+ community who has ever struggled with what it means to be a part of that community and be proud of their identity.

    HPB Staff Review