Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

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Average customer rating 4.9 (9 comments)

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I've had this book since my first year of graduate school. After 5 grueling years of academia, research, internship, my first job and a beautiful wedding, I finally had the chance to read it. Loved it from page one! Fun Home is a well written book that was enlightening and encouraging. As a mental health provider, I was surprisingly impressed with the accuracy of the diagnosis captured. Awesome read!

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If graphic novels were organized into sections the way prose novels are (e.g. Romance, Science Fiction, etc.) there are very few which would be classified as literature, but Fun Home belongs in that category. An autobiographical book that beautifully analyzes Alison Bechdel’s homosexual awakening and her relationship with her father through memory and metaphor. Transcending the graphic novel genre, Fun Home won not only comics industry awards, but Best Book awards as well. It was on over two-dozen top 10 lists for 2006, named number 1 by a few including Time Magazine. It has also been put on a number top 10 books of the decade lists, including Entertainment Weekly.

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I loved Fun Home. It's smart, funny, dark and gothic all at once. It's a memoir and a coming of age story of sorts but it's also the story of the author's dad and his struggle with his sexuality. And it's a graphic memoir told in obsessive archival detail with photos, notes, and old maps all painstakingly reproduced. I cannot recommend it enough.

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This book is always the first that comes to me when I see or hear something about recommending books to others or about favourite books. With the millions of thoughts swimming through the average reader's head every day, in my opinion it's quite meaningful when one particular book springs frequently to mind. Bechdel's book is one of beauty and eloquence, the perfect treatment of a life that seems at times to be stranger than fiction. I challenge anyone who scoffs at graphic novels as literature to experience Fun Home, and challenge those who harbour no such notions to still do the same.

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Alison Bechdel's accomplishment is eloquent, interesting and deeply personal. Its content is restrained and rational in portrayal but highly emotional just beneath the surface. One of the greatest graphic novels ever and certainly on of the best books to have come out during the aughts.

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"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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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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[a]Alison Bechdel [/a]is best known for her long-running [t]Dykes to Watch Out For[/t] strip, which has been a fixture in the [kw]LGBT[/kw] 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.

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A strikingly intelligent and literate memoir chronicling Bechdel's deeply ambivalent relationship with her father. He is an aesthete, a pederast, and the strongest and most enigmatic influence in young Bechdel's life. She strives to forge her own identity while navigating the aspects of his personality that they share-- both positive and negative. Though the subject matter is serious, Bechdel's wry tone and dark humor make it a lively (and occassionally downright funny) read. I was slightly dissatisfied with the final frame which suggests a perfunctory resolution that comes too easily and does not hold true to the conflicted tone of the rest of the book. Other than that a lovely read and one I highly recommend.