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. ( )

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. ( )