Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic―A New York Times Best Book of the 21st Century!

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 literary 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, a unique coming-of-age story written with controlled force and enlivened with humor, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail.
How does a daughter resolve the legacy of mystery left by the man she called her father?
- Family Secrets: Growing up in the family funeral home, nicknamed the “Fun Home,” was only the first layer of mystery in a household built on secrets.
- LGBTQ+ Coming of Age: As Alison comes out as a lesbian in college, she makes a discovery about her father that forces her to re-examine her entire childhood.
- A Complicated Father-Daughter Story: A raw and honest exploration of a fraught relationship with a distant, exacting, and enigmatic father.
- Literary Nonfiction: A narrative woven with rich literary allusions and heartbreaking honesty that redefines what a graphic memoir can be.
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Community Reviews
What Bookclubbers are saying about this book
✨ Summarized by Bookclubs AI
Readers say they find Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home" to be a deeply honest, literary-rich graphic memoir that explores complex family relationships, iden...
Not a bad book, just I didn’t get it. Many references to classic authors and books that went over my head :( (obviously that’s on me) there were moments that I liked and I can tell the author is very smart and talented but overall I just didn’t relate I guess.
a bit pretentious and tedious, frankly
read this sometime in august or september? gay dad :((
Previously read by LezRead May 2011
I really liked the way this graphic novel was illustrated and the way the story was told. Bechdel has a humorous way of addressing topics that could be considered taboo or hard to talk about. Even though the pictures of the scenes were drawn out for me, I was still able to get my own picture of what was happening and see it in my mind. The only thing I will say is that the comic was very literary heavy with references to a lot of different writings and I feel like I missed out on parts of the novel because I did not know the authors or stories she was referring to. Plus I feel as though she used very big vocabulary and word choices that I did not always feel fit the panel, but overall I enjoyed this as my first graphic novel.
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