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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
by Alison Bechdel
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About This Book
ISBN13: 9780618477944 |
Powells.com Staff Pick
Easily the best original graphic novel since Craig Thompson's Blankets! A breathtaking achievement as well as a riveting memoir in comic form, Fun Home boosts Alison Bechdel to the front ranks of today's finest autobiographical comic storytellers, right up there with Art Spiegelman, Joe Sacco, and Thompson.
Recommended by Bolton, Powells.com
Alison Bechdel, creator of the Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip, uses the cartoon form to tell the story of her coming out and the discovery of her father's sexual orientation. The title refers to the funeral home where she grew up, and her parents were certainly as dysfunctional as anyone on Six Feet Under. This is a great example of cartooning as memoir.
Recommended by Doug C., Powells.com (See all of our Staff Top 5s of 2006)
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
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.
Review:
"This autobiography by the author of the long-running strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, deals with her childhood with a closeted gay father, who was an English teacher and proprietor of the local funeral parlor (the former allowed him access to teen boys). Fun Home refers both to the funeral parlor, where he put makeup on the corpses and arranged the flowers, and the family's meticulously restored gothic revival house, filled with gilt and lace, where he liked to imagine himself a 19th-century aristocrat. The art has greater depth and sophistication than Dykes; Bechdel's talent for intimacy and banter gains gravitas when used to describe a family in which a man's secrets make his wife a tired husk and overshadow his daughter's burgeoning womanhood and homosexuality. His court trial over his dealings with a young boy pushes aside the importance of her early teen years. Her coming out is pushed aside by his death, probably a suicide. The recursively told story, which revisits the sites of tragic desperation again and again, hits notes that resemble Jeanette Winterson at her best. Bechdel presents her childhood as a 'still life with children' that her father created, and meditates on how prolonged untruth can become its own reality. She's made a story that's quiet, dignified and not easy to put down." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
"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)
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)
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
Review:
"A pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics and memoir) in multiple new directions... 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." Sean Wilsey, The New York Times Book Review
Review:
"[R]iveting....Fun Home is a beautiful, assured piece of work, by far the best thing Bechdel has done in over two decades as a cartoonist....Bechdel's cartooning has transmuted his life and death into an extraordinary book..." Douglas Wolk, Salon.com
Review:
"[A] revelation: Here is a panel-and-drawings book that feels like a true literary achievement, something with characters who baffle and disappoint and break hearts the way people do in life and in the best of prose." Minneapolis Star Tribune
Review:
"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
Review:
"Alison Bechdel — she's one of the best, one to watch out for." Harvey Pekar, author of American Splendor
Review:
"Stupendous. Alison Bechdel's mesmerizing feat of familial resurrection is a rare, prime example of why graphic novels have taken over the conversation about American literature. The details — visual and verbal, emotional and elusive — are devastatingly captured by an artist in total control of her craft." Chip Kidd, author of The Cheese Monkeys
Review:
"Brave and forthright and insightful — exactly what Alison Bechdel does best." Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina
Review:
"The year's best (graphic) novel is brilliantly conceived and fearlessly executed, and you will not soon forget your journey through it." Portland Oregonian
Review:
"At times, Bechdel's prose gets a little opaque — not because she's a bad writer, but because I didn't pay attention in high school....Fun Home is an intricate document of a childhood that, ultimately, was enough like mine — only with a few more literary references — that for me, it worked." Jill Soloway, Los Angeles Times
Review:
"Bechdel's drawing style is simple but effective." San Francisco Chronicle
Review:
"A comic book for lovers of words! Bechdel's rich language and precise images combine to create a lush piece of work." Sean Wilsey, New York Times
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."
What Our Readers Are Saying
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Average customer rating based on 5 comments:
-
Sharon Bryan, May 14, 2007 (view all comments by Sharon Bryan)
"Fun Home" is a brilliant, funny, intriging, and deeply moving graphic novel. Ms. Bechdel gives her readers a rare and bold memoir that is ripe with brutal but beautiful honesty. Even in the most painful revelations, she never loses the humor and awareness of the ironic or absurd. Her illustrations add charm and intimacy to the story, and compliment her well-crafted words perfectly with detail and a keen eye. Her observations on the complex nature of her family is sapient and engrossing. This is the perfect union of word and image.
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ridermae, December 22, 2006 (view all comments by ridermae)
This book is so many-layered and so stylistically exciting and literarily intense...it's my new favorite book of the moment.
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Kirsten, August 17, 2006 (view all comments by Kirsten)
Alison Bechdel is best known for her long-running Dykes to Watch Out For strip, which has been a fixture in the LGBT press for more than fifteen years. Now she turns her talents to the more explicitly autobiographical with this book, which tells the story of her father and her childhood. Bechdel's father was an agonizingly careful man who dressed with care and spent every moment of his leisure time restoring the family's Victorian-era home. At the same time as he was assembling such a careful front, he was leading a hidden life, parrallel and yet divergent from Bechdel's own. Bechdel's voice in this memoir is sad yet wry, and the book is funny and poignant by turns, and her clean, careful artwork melds seamlessly with the story. At times this book can feel somewhat reserved in comparison to other, more exuberantly drawn and told comic memoirs, but it suits the subject matter to a T.
View all 5 comments
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780618477944
- Subtitle:
- A Family Tragicomic
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Houghton Mifflin Company
- Location:
- Boston
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- United states
- Subject:
- Fathers and daughters
- Subject:
- Cartoonists
- Subject:
- Graphic Novels - General
- Copyright:
- 2006
- Edition Number:
- 1st
- Edition Description:
- HARDCOVER
- Publication Date:
- June 8, 2006
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Grade Level:
- General/trade
- Language:
- English
- Illustrations:
- , Y
- Pages:
- 232
- Dimensions:
- 9.26x6.44x.82 in. 1.21 lbs.
