Product Description

One of the most eagerly anticipated graphic memoirs of recent years, "Fun Home" is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Alison Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis", it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, 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 his male students and the 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14792 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Nick Hornby, NEW STATESMAN
"Fun Home is as satisfying a literary experience as you're likely
to have this year"

Margaret Reynolds, THE TIMES
"Fun Home is a profound and important book. Every home should
have one"

Jeanette Winterson, THE TIMES
"A wonderful piece, moving and clever"

Customer Reviews

A compassionate memoir which nevertheless doesn't shrink from difficult truths.
Alison Bechdel offers a work of rare honesty and flair. In this graphic novel autobiography, she explores the life and death of her father, and chronicles her own growing-up years within an unusual family. The Bechdels' funeral home business serves as an accidentally apt metaphor for the emotional austerity of a home where Alison's father is gay, closeted and often unhappy with himself and others; and where, seemingly unnoticed, the young Alison is growing into her own sexuality, and her identity as a lesbian.

The book interweaves incidents from family and individual lives with Alison's childhood journal entries, her father's photographs, and scenes from the books she and her father share as a form of personal communication and analysis. This scrapbook approach blends narrative and character development perfectly, and reminds us how often we are defined by, and seek to understand ourselves better through, the things we love.

I was often struck forcefully - as I rarely have been when reading autobiography - by the fact that these were real people. This immediacy seems the result of a combination of the medium and the author's decision to lay bare the most compelling and difficult questions of her own family life.

Moving, intelligent and thought provoking...
I bought this book simply because it was by Alison Bechdel and I love her "Dykes To Watch Out For" strip. It is not like her usual work but is a powerfully moving autobiography in cartoons - the way she uses pictures and words to tell this complex story is amazing and meant that I read this much more slowly than I normally read and I immediately reread it. I really loved how she does not simply tell her story in a linear manner but comes back on it over and over again, so each time, I felt I was getting closer to the heart of the matter. I also liked how she linked her reading with what was going on for her and her father. Like the previous reviewer said, that this is a real story involving real people, was constant in my own mind as I read it, and raises a lot of questions about autobiography in general and how we remember things. Well worth a read - I can't think of anyone who would not be moved by this book.

Wolverhampton Libraries LGBT Reading Group Review
Despite the apprehension experienced by many readers when this graphic novel was presented to the LGBT Reading Group, everybody really enjoyed it.

You discover the bones of the story early on... the Bechdel's live in the family-run funeral home in a close knit community; Alison is coming out as a lesbian; her mom wants a divorce; her father is gay.

Bruce Bechdel's life is a sham; a sensitive, creative, reserved man who, in a flash, can became cold, belligerent and driven. Shortly after he dies in mysterious circumstances Alison finds out that he's been having sex with young men and has been in trouble with the law.

The story weaves through time as Alison delves deeper and deeper into the main events of her family history to reveal a tragic yet fascinating upbringing.

Although some of the themes could be regarded as heavy, they are lifted by Alison's unique and clever style - her monochrome illustrations tell her story in a remarkable way that just words never could. It seems too simple to announce that this is a really good book, but it is!