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Fun Home

A Family Tragicomic

By Alison Bechdel

(69)

| Hardcover | 9780618477944

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Book Description

This breakout book by Alison Bechdel takes its place alongside the unnerving, memorable, darkly funny family memoirs of Augusten Burroughs and Mary Karr. It's a father-daughter tale pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings andlike Marjane Satrapi's Persepolisa story exhilaContinue

This breakout book by Alison Bechdel takes its place alongside the unnerving, memorable, darkly funny family memoirs of Augusten Burroughs and Mary Karr. It's a father-daughter tale pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings andlike Marjane Satrapi's Persepolisa story exhilaratingly suited to the graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian house, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift . . . graphic . . . and redemptive.

Critics

  • Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic By Alison Bechdel

    Putting the fun back in funeral and spicing it with tenderness, grit and regret, Alison Bechdel's memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic grabs you from the first page and never lets go. It's like reading someone's diary, because essentially it is someo ... (read full critics)

    bookpage published on Sat, 18 Sep 2010

  • Fun Home

    Don’t expect Yet More Dykes to Watch Out For from this smart, moving, attractively drawn, and decidedly serious memoir in comics form. Alison Bechdel's long-running Dykes strip is witty enough for anyone—the lesbian Doonesbury, if you like—but this f ... (read full critics)

    raintaxi published on Fri, 3 Sep 2010

6 Reviews

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  • 2 people find this helpful

    GGNFT nominee. One of the best (and most important) graphic novels of the year.

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    Little J said on Sep 21, 2006 | Add your feedback

  • 1 person find this helpful

    I don't know where to start with this review. This book was a wonderful example of non-linear narrative. The story jumped around in time from episode to episode but while the story didn't progress in time the depth and understanding of the people and their relationships in it increased with each ne ... (continue)

    I don't know where to start with this review. This book was a wonderful example of non-linear narrative. The story jumped around in time from episode to episode but while the story didn't progress in time the depth and understanding of the people and their relationships in it increased with each new chapter revealing another layer of depth. Each chapter also had it's own literary theme, referring to a novel the author or her father liked and how it reflected their lives. (I must admit I found the Proust one the most dull but that's probably cause I've not read Proust). It was a very interesting, honest and insightful book. Definitely one I'd recommend.

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    Robot-mel said on Jun 27, 2011 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

  • 1 person find this helpful

    Every chapter tells the same story, again & again: the relationship between the author and her father. Always with new details, deeper feelings, some humor, literary citations (Proust, Joyce) & comparisons. Wonderful.

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    chioru - ki said on May 16, 2011 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

  • pruned of the oh so very central gay issue, hark hark!, the story is the usual one of a disfunctional family. the young enthusiast lesbian is quite irritating, when she is eager to morph into a boy and blasts her father for being a closet gay - and a manque' interior decorator, as if it was a fatal ... (continue)

    pruned of the oh so very central gay issue, hark hark!, the story is the usual one of a disfunctional family. the young enthusiast lesbian is quite irritating, when she is eager to morph into a boy and blasts her father for being a closet gay - and a manque' interior decorator, as if it was a fatal flow. i admit my aversion to all things american, though.

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    Elsastella said on Nov 27, 2009 | Add your feedback

  • With so many awards, I thought this could be good. Well, I had to force myself to finish it. My wife did like it though.

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    jelabino said on Nov 13, 2009 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

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9780618477944 Hardcover $19.95 $17.05 bn.com
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