From its title, Fun Home connotes so many motifs of this graphic memoir: a cavalier nickname for the family's funeral home, an ironic description for Alison Bechdel's childhood that is both tense and pretense, and an association with carnivalesque "fun houses," where everything is distorted and unreal.

Alison tells her childhood/coming out memoir through a lens of her father's suspected suicide when she was twenty. Hindsight lends a lot of depth to her complicated relationship with him; they were both gay and both "knew" about one another but could hardly talk about it within the confines of their appearance as a normal Catholic suburban family. Still, if they never got the hang of a father-daughter relationship properly, they did become intellectual partners over a shared hobby of reading. Fun Home is dense with intertextuality, references to literature through which Alison and her father connected.

All in all, the memoir ends up bittersweet (or, as the subtitle suggests, a "tragicomic"). Alison never reduces her relationship with her father to anything saccharine or perfectly understood, but leaves it both complicated and cut short by his suicide. ( )

my first graphic novel, and what a great way to get acquainted with this genre. unique and poignant. not exactly fun, though. ( )

I finally had to buy this book because I found myself renewing this book from the library so often, not because I hadn't read it, but because of my need to read and reread it. This graphic memoir is smart, well-written, and extremely moving. ( )

My “Literature And Sexualities” course last semester is responsible for me reading this ‘graphic memoir’. It tells the story of Alison Bechdel (yes, the author) and her experiences growing up, coming to terms with her sexuality and, coincidentally the sexuality of her father as well, who seemed to have been hiding his own sexuality until the day he was hit by a truck (a death that Alison herself saw as a suicide).

I never expected to be so excited by this book. When I saw we were going to be reading a graphic novel in my literature course, I got a bit peeved because, well, it’s a LITERATURE course, goddamnit! Where are my novels?! But I was so pleased with this. It has made me love my professor even more than I already did. So far, her books for the class have been incredibly good. The ease with which I found myself relating to Alison (and, oddly, some of her habits – such as the OCD she describes as a child) helped draw me into the books. Her illustrations are just perfect. The allusions to literature that this memoir is THICK with helps appeal to me as a reader and an English major as well as another gay person.

She is not just a good writer, as her story is compelling and well written, but an impressive artist as well. This is a very important book, I think. I feel privileged in that I was able to learn about her life. ( )

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (2007)