Fun Home / Spanish Edition - Rambling Readers

Paperback, 234 pages

Published Nov. 29, 2016 by Reservoir Books.

ISBN:: 978-607-31-4262-5

(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 …

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.

12 editions

crabbygirl reviewed Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

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 …

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 be fleshed into an entire book. it's the sparseness, the things that aren't said with words, but are in the drawings, that make this a large book even though it's a mere 230 pages

Norah

rated it

June 6, 2022