Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

by Alison Bechdel

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

If you only know Alison Bechdel from The Bechdel Test, let us introduce you to her graphic memoir. If you're looking for a great read about family secrets, let us introduce you to her graphic memoir.

CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED, NATIONAL BESTSELLER 

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21^ST 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780618871711
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/05/2007
Series:	Edition 001 Series
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

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? Most recently, The Secret to Superman Strength was named a New York Times Best Graphic Novel of 2021. Bechdel has been named a MacArthur Fellow, among many other honors.

Editorial Reviews

"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 —

“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.”  — 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 for this emerging literary form.” — USA Today

From the Publisher

This coming-of-age story cuts across categories. Alison Bechdel's autobiographical "tragicomic" is illustrated with the author's own cartoons and her account of her own maturation is knotted tightly against the bizarre double life of her closeted gay father. Bechdel gained fame as the author of the comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For," but this memoir/family portrait proves that she can straddle genres with ease.

A comic book for lovers of words! Bechdel's rich language and precise images combine to create a lush piece of work — a memoir where concision and detail are melded for maximum, obsessive density. She has obviously spent years getting this memoir right, and it shows. You can read Fun Home in a sitting, or get lost in the pictures within the pictures on its pages. The artist's work is so absorbing you feel you are living in her world.
— The New York Times

Sean Wilsey

Bechdel's memoir offers a graphic narrative of uncommon richness, depth, literary resonance and psychological complexity. Though Bechdel (known for her syndicated "Dykes to Watch Out For" strip and collections) takes her formal cues from comic books, she receives more inspiration from the likes of Proust and Joyce as she attempts to unravel the knots of her family's twisted emotional history. At the core of this compelling narrative is her relationship with her father, a literary-minded high-school teacher who restores and runs the familial funeral parlor. (It is also the family's residence and the "fun home" of the title.) Beneath his icy reserve and fussy perfectionism, he is a barely closeted homosexual and a suspected pedophile, an imposing but distant presence to his young daughter, who finds that their main bond is a shared literary sensibility. As she comes of age as an artist and comes to terms with her own sexual identity, Bechdel must also deal with the dissolution of her parents' marriage and, soon afterward, her father's death. Was it an accident or was it suicide? How did her father's sexuality shape her own? Rather than proceeding in chronological fashion, the memoir keeps circling back to this central relationship and familial tragedy, an obsession that the artist can never quite resolve or shake. The results are painfully honest, occasionally funny and penetratingly insightful. Feminists, lesbians and fans of underground comics will enthusiastically embrace this major advance in Bechdel's work, which should significantly extend both her renown and her readership. Though this will likely be stocked with graphic novels, it shares as much in spirit with the work of Mary Karr,Tobias Wolff and other contemporary memoirists of considerable literary accomplishment.

Kirkus Reviews