Fun Home is Bechdel's autobiography from childhood to college, where she came out as a lesbian. It is also the story of her father, a closeted gay man who may or may not have taken his own life at the age of 43. Bechdel masterfully weaves these two stories together in a poetic, eloquent, and intimate way. Although the Bechdel family, who inherited a funeral home, or "fun home" as the kids called it, is far from ordinary, the situations and issues the family must deal with are recognizable to anyone--even those who have happy, "well-adjusted" families. Her relationship with her father, simultaneously distant and close (although her father was emotionally cold towards his family, he and Alison shared a love of books that brought them together) will probably hit home with many readers. Fun Home is not only one of my favorite graphic novels, it's one of my favorite books period. ( )

Forget that this is a graphic novel if that's not your thing. This is some of the best *writing* period that you'll ever read. ( )

Forget that this is a graphic novel if that's not your thing. This is some of the best *writing* period that you'll ever read. ( )

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. ( )