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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED, NATIONAL BESTSELLER

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

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

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.

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232 pages

Average rating: 7.84

99 RATINGS

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6 REVIEWS

Community Reviews

get.a.jeevan
Sep 02, 2024
8/10 stars
what are the odds of reading this while travelling, walking into a small secondhand bookstore in an unknown town and finding Ulysses and Swann’s Way stacked right next to each other? T_T I got them both and had quite a conversation with the owner!

This was a wonderful read, love the artwork, the writing, the style, the themes, the parallels! I’m not sure how to feel about the unaddressed paedophilia, hence the 4 !
YoSafBridg
Mar 31, 2024
10/10 stars
When i grow up i want to write like Alison Bechdel. She has such an understated, honest way with words (i delude myself into thinking i write that way but she does it so much better~the way i want to). She is both witty and wry. I remember we used to carry her comic Dykes to Watch Out For in my bookstore and now she's come out with an autobiographical graphic novel: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic a tale of her childhood and early young adulthood.The Fun Home of the title is a shortened form of the "Funeral Home" that makes up the family business as well as a reference to her father's obsession with restoring their Gothic revival style house in rural Pennsylvania to its former splendor. Her father and mother are both English teachers and both distant in their own way. Although Bechdel has two brothers this is really a father and daughter story with the rest of the family revolving around that story. As Bechdel comes of age and tries to come to terms with who she is and who she is becoming, she searches her father's closeted homosexual (actually more than homosexual~as it involved teenage boys for the most part and there is an important distinction to be made there) life and, later, death by apparent suicide (which came about a mere four months after her own coming-out). This novel is not, however, a "gay" novel, it is truly about family relationships and it is often framed by literary works (from classical myth, to Proust, to Joyce, to Camus)~as Bechdel's was a literary family.
Few authors could write with such depth and yet such a deft touch on a subject that is so emotionally close to their own heart. It is that deft touch which makes this book such a work of art.
jordant
Nov 06, 2023
7/10 stars
Many references to classic literature that I’m too uncultured to know and too lazy to research but I still enjoyed it. Each chapter progressively added more character depth and the art style was a good fit which I enjoyed
rishichinnasamy
Oct 30, 2023
10/10 stars
dude. holy zoinks. dude.
E Clou
May 10, 2023
8/10 stars
Having read my first graphic novel just a few weeks ago, I can't stop now. Alison Bechdel is really smart. Her subject matter is interesting, but what's more interesting is how she thinks about and writes about the subject matter. It's one of those books that mention a million other books. She makes me want to read even more.

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