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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
by Alison Bechdel

Your Price: $19.95
New – Hardcover
Autographed First Edition
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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 and — like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis — a 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.

  • "Bechdel's memoir offers a graphic narrative of uncommon richness, depth, literary resonance and psychological complexity....The results are painfully honest, occasionally funny and penetratingly insightful." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
  • "Bechdel's long-running Dykes to Watch Out For is arguably the best comic strip going, and Fun Home is one of the very best graphic novels ever." Booklist (Starred Review)
  • "[S]plendid....More than the witty art, more than the mordant prose, it is this openness that distinguishes Bechdel's generous and intelligent work....[I]t has a depth and sweetness few can match at five times the length. (Grade: A)" Entertainment Weekly

About the Author
Alison Bechdel has been a careful archivist of her own life and kept a journal since she was ten. Since 1983 she has been chronicling the lives of various characters in the fictionalized Dykes to Watch Out For strip, "one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period" (Ms.). The strip is syndicated in 50 alternative newspapers, translated into multiple languages, and collected into a book series with a quarter of a million copies in print. Utne magazine has listed DTWOF as "one of the greatest hits of the twentieth century."
 
 
 
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