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Trade Paperback
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9780618871711
Overview
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.
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
Customer Reviews
Rating Snapshot
5 ★
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7 Ratings
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A raw memoir about a dysfunctional family.
Samantha M. - 1 year 7 months agoI 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. - 2 years agoI 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. - 5 years 1 month agoAllison 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 -
Masterful
Laura S. - 6 years agoComplicated, non-linear, insightful story about discovering and recovering from your family and yourself. #BannedBook
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Excellent graphic memoir
Susannah R. - 6 years agoBechdel's graphic memoir documents her fraught relationship with her father in particular, and also with her mother. She compares him to Icarus, Ulysses, and Camus. Her language is deeply academic and analytical, questioning her father's motivations, his behavior, and his relationship with the family. He decorates their house endlessly and (she later discovers) has affairs with young men. He died, possibly by suicide, four months after Bechdel revealed to her family by letter that she is a lesbian. She and her father, an English teacher, communicate via book recommendations and interpretations as she gets older, so it makes sense that she views the family history through a lens of literature references. I didn't find it pompous, part of the value of books and movies is to help us relate to our own lives. Even Camus, probably. This almost made me wish I still had my childhood diaries. Almost. #BannedBook