Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic Hardback - 2006
by Alison Bechdel
Summary
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.
Reader reviews for Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Review summary
Reviewers largely praised Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home as a literate, candid graphic memoir that blends memoir and literary analysis to probe identity and a fraught father-daughter relationship. Many found it engrossing, emotionally affecting, and structurally ambitious, with text-forward storytelling complemented by detailed art. Some, however, felt the nonlinear timeline and intellectual layering could be distancing or confusing, the tone heavy, and at times pretentious. Overall, it’s seen as a standout—if demanding—work that especially appeals to literary-minded readers.
Readers say this book is:
literaryintrospectivecandidemotionally resonantthought-provokingnonlinearheavycompellingartfulpretentious to someA family biography in the form of a graphic memoir, this book is a truly amazing feat. 'Fun Home' refers to the nickname given to the funeral parlor which is the family business. It is also the wry, overarching metaphor of Bechdel's family life. Her father Bruce Bechdel is a part time English teacher as well as director of the funeral parlor. Her mother Helen is also an English teacher, yet despite their intellectual capacities both Bechdel's parents are emotionally distant and undemonstrative. Her childhood therefore plays out a constant disparity between the emotions and the intellect, a disparity which she experiences as a disturbing, unsettling mystery. It is thus her purpose to understand the implications of this mystery, whilst at the same time exploring and coming to terms with issues of sexuality, love, betrayal and secrecy. It is a brave expose of difficult personal and family relationships. A wonderful read.
a reader
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From the publisher
Details
- Title Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
- Author Alison Bechdel
- Binding Hardback
- Edition First Edition
- Pages 232
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher Houghton Mifflin, Boston
- Publication date 2006
- Illustrated Yes
- ISBN 9780618477944 / 0618477942
- Weight 1.21 lbs (0.55 kg)
- Dimensions 9.26 x 6.44 x 0.82 in (23.52 x 16.36 x 2.08 cm)
- Category Graphic Novels
- Library of Congress subjects Fathers and daughters, Graphic novels
- Library of Congress Catalogue Number 2005030304
- Dewey Decimal Code B
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by Bechdel, Alison
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