Fun Home

A Family Tragicomic

Paperback, 240 pages

Published Oct. 1, 2006 by Jonathan Cape, imusti.

ISBN:
978-0-224-08051-4
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5 stars (2 reviews)

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 …

12 editions

Review of 'Fun Home' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

my what a difference a few years make!
I found an old review for this book from 2012 and it's quite a departure from 2015 me (or maybe I got the title wrong... she also wrote Are You My Mother? and that one's dense with references
2012
this memoir intertwines the author's declaration of her homosexuality with the revelation that her father was a closeted gay man until a few months before his apparent suicide. using numerous literary works by authors that are too daunting for me to approach just yet (like Proust, Camus, and James Joyce) the implications of the parallels were - more than occasionally - lost on me.
2015:
this artist is an intellectual and a masterful author. I haven't read such a wonderful graphic novel since Blankets by Craig Thompson. each of the chapters could stand on it's own as a story, or a theme, and …

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5 stars