Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Alison Bechdel

Jun 2007 · Sold by HarperCollins

About this ebook

CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED, NATIONAL BESTSELLER 

Time Magazine #1 Book of the Year • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • 

Winner of the Stonewall Book Award • Double finalist for the Lambda Book Award •

Nominated for the GLAAD Media Award

Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir that charts her fraught relationship with her late father. 

Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the "Fun Home." It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.

In her hands, personal history becomes a work of amazing subtlety and power, written with controlled force and enlivened with humor, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail.

Ratings and reviews

Definitely would have connected more if I was literature buff, but it hit homes on the topic of growing up with parental issues. It can be repetitive at times, and some graphic pictures so be careful if reading outside your own privacy 😆

Book caught my attention when duke university required it, and some religious Christian students consequently boycotted it. I don't go to duke, but I was curious about what the hubbub was about. It's a reasonably done autobiography in graphic novel format, although some of the literary references went over my head. Yes, there were done erotic scenes in there, but just enough to make it interesting and not so much that the book was rendered pornographic.

I read the book after falling in love with the musical and reading the 2nd book, Are You My Mother. Our families are nothing alike, and yet there are little bits in this book that feel just like my own life. An interesting and challenging read, this book was as fun and touching. 5/5. Passed the Bechdel test. But just barely, lol!

About the author

ALISON BECHDEL’s cult following for her early comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For expanded wildly for her family memoirs, the New York Times bestselling and Time magazine #1 Book of the Year graphic memoir Fun Home, adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical, and Are You My Mother? Bechdel has been named a MacArthur Fellow and Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont, among many other honors. The Secret to Superman Strength is her third graphic memoir.