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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic Paperback – Illustrated, June 5 2007
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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.
- Print length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books Classics
- Publication dateJune 5 2007
- Reading age15 years and up
- Dimensions15.24 x 1.69 x 22.86 cm
- ISBN-100544709047
- ISBN-13978-0618871711
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Review
"A splendid autobiography...refreshingly open and generous." —Entertainment Weekly "Fun Home must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced. . . . pioneering." —The New York Times Book Review "A masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other." —Time Magazine "Graphic storytelling at its most profound." —Los Angeles Times, Favorite Book of the Year "The great writing of the twenty-first century may well be found in graphic novels and nonfiction....Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is an astonishing advertisement fro this emerging literary form." —USA Today "Brilliant and bittersweet." —The Boston Globe "Beautiful combines the mundane with the macabre, adding doses of wry, poignant humor on every page." —Washington Post "One of the best memoirs of the decade ... at once hypercontrolled and utterly intimate." —New York Magazine, Best Books of the Year "A revelation ... feels like a true literary achievement, something with characters who baffle and disappoint and break hears the way people do in life and in the best of prose." —Minneapolis Star-Tribune "If David Sedaris could draw, and if Bleak House had been a little funnier, you'd have Alison Bechdel's Fun Home." —Amy Bloom, author of A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You “Alison Bechdel – she’s one of the best, one to watch out for." —Harvey Pekar "Masterful...an enormously successful work." —Village Voice "A staggeringly literate and revealing autobiography." —Seattle Times "Brave and forthright and insightful--exactly what Alison Bechdel does best." —Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina "Stupendous...mesmerizing...The details...are devastatingly captured by an artist in total control of her craft." —Chip Kidd, author of The Cheese Monkeys "[Alison Bechdel] hits notes that resemble Jeanette Winterson at her best...She's made a story that's quiet [and] dignified." —Publishers Weekly, Starred "[With] uncommon richness [and] depth...[Fun Home] shares as much in spirit with...other contemporary memoirists of considerable literary accomplishment." —Kirkus Reviews, Starred "One of the very best graphic novels ever." —Booklist, ALA, Starred Review —
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.
Product details
- ASIN : 0618871713
- Publisher : Mariner Books Classics; 1st edition (June 5 2007)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0544709047
- ISBN-13 : 978-0618871711
- Item weight : 386 g
- Dimensions : 15.24 x 1.69 x 22.86 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: #6,619 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

ALISON BECHDEL has been a careful archivist of her own life and kept a journal since she was ten. Since 1983 she has been chronicling the lives of various characters in the fictionalized “Dykes to Watch Out For” strip, “one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period” (Ms.). The strip is syndicated in 50 alternative newspapers, translated into multiple languages, and collected into a book series with a quarter of a million copies in print. Utne magazine has listed DTWOF as “one of the greatest hits of the twentieth century.”
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The book is mostly interesting for its tell-all character—literally and graphically. Don’t be fooled by the title “Fun Home” or the “comic” element in the subtitle. Fun House is a cynical allusion to the family’s ancillary source of income: a funeral home. Alison had an early and frank introduction to naked dead bodies and the technicalities of embalming. She gradually realizes her father’s secret attraction to young boys, including underage ones. When she attends college she discovers her own sexual same gender attraction and has a lesbian relationship. Her father gets caught providing alcohol to a minor. When he dies after being hit by a truck she surmises that it was no accident but suicide. That he no longer could face living a charade.
This is definitely not a book for preadolescents (due to mature subjects) or anyone ignorant of Greek mythology, classical literature or nineteenth century writers á la Marcel Proust or James Joyce. Discussion of literary theory and references is the author’s hobby horse that she rides on the highways and byways of her thoughtstreams. Consequently her work has been endorsed by academia and included as assigned reading for students by lecturers, to the chagrin of some.
No doubt the author needed to write a memoir to get her childhood sorted about her attraction and repulsion towards her father. Hopefully she was rewarded by a personal catharsis. Personally, as a reader, I found this book tragic and depressing with very little humour to be found. Compositionally it is a staccato performance, the flow continually being interrupted by retrospective incidentals. However, it should be said that the art is good, excellent in detail. It is a tale of Alison’s self-discovery and coming out. But the shadow of her father’s controlling influence and deceptively counterfeit lifestyle looms darkly throughout.
Top reviews from other countries
This means when I want to sample someone's creative work to see if it's something I would actually read or watch all the way through, I have to use ... other means. Let's just pretend I borrowed it from the library.
When I sampled this book, it hooked me so well that I couldn't stop at sampling it. I read the whole thing in one sitting, without even thinking to pause to find out where I could pay her properly for a higher-quality copy that I'd probably appreciate more, because that would take me out of the moment and I didn't want that.
Having finished it, I've come here and made sure Ms. Bechdel gets her due, because she deserves it.
People more eloquent than I have talked about its subject matter and why it's good, but if its description hasn't already turned you off, based on your moral principles, then you're probably compatible with this autobio-graphical-novel and I think you should just pick it up and get started. I'm certain you'll enjoy it too.
TL;DR: Great book; buy it.
Her 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home actually represents two genres, one that is not widely read and another that is growing in strength, so much so that US colleges have added it to their reading lists for liberal arts students. Fun Home attracted criticism from more conservative students, who disagree with its sexual content and imagery. The fact that colleges believe students can learn from a graphic novel—and the novel can cause such a stir—is a testament to its ingenuity.
Bechdel sees no need to tell the story of her father’s death, the emergence of her own homosexuality and everything that led up to the two in a linear fashion. Instead, she zips between her family home, the title funeral home, her college classes and trips away with her mother, father and siblings, choosing to join the chapters by her feelings towards particular situations or events rather than in any traditional sequence. The story centres around the death of Bechdel’s father and what it means to her. Bechdel’s journeys into the past reveal a father who preferred to restore houses than spend time with his daughter, and who slept with men, often his students, behind the back of his wife and family.
Fun Home delivers the tragedy in Bechdel’s life with comedic aplomb, illustrating key scenes from her childhood and adolescence in a cartoon style that harks back to the comics that came before. Particularly revealing is a snapshot of a certain letter from father to daughter, because his indecipherable handwriting means all the reader has is the narrator’s reflections. Lacking context, Bechdel’s narrator must be relied upon, and the next page reveals the last time she saw her father, in an illustration that shows them getting on as well as they can, sat next to each other playing the piano. “It was unusual, and we were close. But close enough,” remarks Bechdel’s narrator.
The strength of Fun Home is in its yearning to understand fatherhood and sexuality and everything else that goes on during the chronicled period of Bechdel’s life. Her narrator never settles on definitive conclusions—it’s not entirely clear if Bechdel’s father committed suicide or was the victim of an accident—but prefers somewhere in the middle, which is both a challenge and a joy for the reader, who too wants to understand where Bechdel’s narrator is coming from, and is likely going next.
Besides the cartoonish illustrations and dry dialogue is a narration that touches on literature of all kinds, as Bechdel likens texts and passages to points in her own time. What’s created is a flowing story that peaks and troughs and runs wild and streams slowly, as Bechdel’s narrator attempts to grow closer to her father, and if not, understand him, and failing that, hate him. When that doesn’t work, she learns to be like him. And the reader is left wondering if there was really anything wrong at all.
I had the experience of working in the upstair apartment of a funeral home temporarily. My first husband's law practice was there. The wallpaper and carpet were funeral home style. The worst part was that I know where the caskets had been.
Alison's farher was eccentric and a perfectionist, not one to give warm hugs. He had affairs with the men he hired and I will never forgive for demanding help with the embalming of a client. Not much help but just being there with a naked corpse is not a good experience for any child.
This book is one of deeply troubled childhood. The graphics and writing was top notch and now I want to read her book about her mother.
You've probably heard of Alison Bechdel thanks to something used in film criticism called the Bechdel Test. For a film to pass the test it need to feature (1) at least two named female characters who (2) talk to each other about (3) something other than a man. Sadly, a lot of movies don't pass this simple three-question test...
I had fun reading Fun home: A Family Tragicomic and checking to see if Bechdel's graphic memoir passed her eponymous test. It took a lot longer than I thought it would, but that's probably just because the test is meant to check films that feature a lot of dialogue and not graphic novels with a lot of narration.
Fun Home tells the story of Bechdel's relationship with her father with plenty of literary allusions (Icarus, The Great Gatsby, what seems to be the entire works of James Joyce). There's also a wide overarching theme of sexuality due to both Alison and her father being gay. The novel is by no means chronological, but as the story continues you revisit scenes with new knowledge.
Bruce (Alison's father) was a closeted high school English teacher and funeral director (who worked at a FUNeral HOME, get it?) who obsesses over restoring the Bechdel house to its Victorian glory. Helen (Alison's mother) worked on her dissertation whenever she wasn't acting in local theatrical productions (that often lent themselves to having themes pertinent to Alison or her parents' lives).
It's in college that Alison realizes she's a lesbian and shortly after coming out to her parents, she finds out that her parents are getting a divorce because of her own father's homosexualtiy. While Alison and her father could have used their shared queerness to grow closer, fate (or her father's decision to kill himself) prevented that from happening. Just weeks after news of the divorce comes out, Bruce is killed by a Sunbeam delivery truck. The official ruling was after crossing the road, something like a snake in the grass caused him to jump backwards into the path of the truck, but Alison thinks he may have backed into the road on purpose. Many parts of the story focus on Alison wondering if her own coming out may have caused her father to commit suicide.
The story and artwork were all very nice. The literary allusions were a little overbearing. Most of them went over my head; I feel like there should be a Cliffs Notes companion pamphlet sold with this to explain most of the connections. What I really want to do now is watch the Broadway musical adaptation of this story. Ever since I saw Sydney Lucas destroy at last year's Tony Awards with "Ring of Keys" I wanted to see what this musical was about. I'm glad I read the novel first but I can't imagine how different everything would be on stage.








