Product DescriptionIn this groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father. 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.
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.
What Others Say
fantastic, read it!
Read Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Edition 001). It was both challenging and easy to read. compelling story, amazing vocabulary, a great gift for young people studying history, psychology, graduate students and people who were once graduate students. just wonderful.
Awesome Graphic Novel - best read without knowing the story! (beware plot spoilers in most of the other reviews)
Bechdel rocks as a comic artist for over 20 years.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Edition 001) is a huge, surprising, candid, funny, serious, revealing slice of her real (you-can't-make-this-stuff-up) life. (and the art is so pleasant)
If you like this kind of work, spend the ten bucks, you won't be sorry.
PS
try to read it without reading about the story/plot in a review, the story really twists and turns and all that will be lost if you hear about it in some blunt summary!
Entertaining, deep, great inclusion of literary and mythical refernces
I was required to read this novel for my Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgendered experience course. I loved the graphics, her choice in detail gives the reader additional information that just what is discussed, and adds to the overall emotional effect. She chose an interesting organization, the novel moves through different memories and still retains a focus. She infuses her writing with literary and mythical references which contribute meaning and entertain. This was the first graphic novel I have read, as well as the first novel concerning the LGBT community. It was a great quick read, and I would recommend it to any one.
Picture Imperfect
The fact that it's a graphic novel isn't what makes Alison Bechdel's revelatory memoir about growing up in a funeral home with her mother, siblings and her erudite, closeted father such a dazzler, though without it (she is the author of the syndicated comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For), one would miss this artist's wry, loopy visual depiction of the rural upstate where she grew up, and the encyclopedic ambivalence of faces that often convey more human truth than those of flesh and blood. But it's her literary voice that makes Fun Home a must-read bildungsroman in this age of Proposition 8 and America's morality wars: it's naked, full of wit and pain in its observance of one woman's gay coming of age.
Rich and impressive - doesn't feel skimpy like other graphic novels
With relatively few exceptions, one of the reasons I haven't really gone back to the graphic novel scene has been that empty feeling after going through dozens of pages of pictures without the sense of having really "read" anything. This isn't a pot-shot at the genre, but rather an expression of the frustration that comes with buying something that costs $35.00 but feeling like I got about $10 worth of reading out of it. This could be a crass way of looking at the problem, but it's rare that artwork can cover up poor storytelling.
I held off reading Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home" until recently, and regret waiting since it is even better than the hype. Non-graphic-novel types frequently name drop specific titles to appear a bit more ... Read More
