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. ( )

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. ( )

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

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel has a level of seriousness that is paralleled by its high level of sophistication. This graphic-novel memoir is as much a portrait of her father as a portrait of the author herself; while the narrative starts out focused on her father's suicide, it becomes apparent that the real story being told is about sexuality - her father's, her own, and how it affected their relationship. As she looks back on her childhood, she sees it with a new intellectual understanding, but without losing the integrity of her younger self's perspective. The memoir follows a very non-linear path, skipping around memories and time as new information comes to light, and becomes more an explanation of ideas and growth rather than a retelling of her life. The book is text-heavy for a comic (subtitled as "a family tragicomic"), and draws parallels she sees in her life to different literary works, as well as drawing on her own diary entries as a child. The simple but accurate drawings are washed in muted greens, and illustrate her questions on gender roles, homosexuality, and herself.
Due to sexual content this book is suggested for mature readers.

Confessional, honest, touching, relatable. Simplicity is power. ( )

Bechdel's memoir has all the elements of touching and powerful writing. Her storytelling style is humorous, sad, and poetic. Alison's drawings are matter of fact and simple, yet include small details that speak volumes about her characters and their interior feelings. Adults and teens will appreciate this book, especially teens who are exploring their sexual identity and family relationships.

Bechdel's graphic novel, in ways, comes across as a cathartic remembrance of her dead father.Fun Home was not terrible. It just lacked emotion for me, nor was I engaged enough with the author as much as I anticipated I would be.
( http://annotatedreading.blogspot.com/... ) ( )

Complex parallel father, daughter memoir.
"The line that Dad drew between reality and fiction was indeed a blurry one. To understand this one had only to enter his library." p.59

(read with Skim by Mariko Tamaki) ( )

One of the best reads I've had in 2009. This memoir was funny, tragic, thoughtful, emotional, and engaging. ( )

As a general rule I don't care much for autobiographical comics. Actually that's not exactly true, as I really enjoy a well-done autobio comic. But while I can to a certain extent enjoy a mediocre super-hero comic, a mediocre autobio comics leave me cold.

So it was with a bit of trepidation that I approached Alison's Bechdel's lauded graphic novel Fun Home. I have on occasion enjoyed Bechdel's regular Dykes to Watch Out For comic (which, to be honest, is borderline fictional autobiography itself), but would she be able to pull off a long-form graphic novel about her family?

Thankfully, the answer is yes, most definitely.

In Fun Home, Bechdel shows a true command of the comics form. There is nothing demonstrably innovative or flashy; yet she expertly weaves together a non-linear narrative that gives insights into facets of her life and that of her family's, and in total is greater than the sum of its parts.

The Fun Home of the title is a funeral home, the family business. But since they live in a small community, Bechdel's father--a distant, seemingly loveless, slightly effeminate man--works his main job as a high school English teacher. While the narrative is about the relations of the entire family, it focuses mainly on Bechdel's relationship with her father, and how she learned in bits and pieces his background and what he really was like.

'Fun Home' is also an ironic title, as life in the Bechdel house was--while not normally abusive--certainly lacking in familial love. There's a telling scene midway through the book when Bechdel is relating the events of her 'year of obsessive-compulsion': A ten-year-old Alison ends every night before going to bed by giving each of her stuffed animals a goodnight kiss, affections she points out that she never remembers receiving from her parents.

What impresses me the most about Fun Home is that Bechdel is able to make me relate to her situation and empathize with her family, even though her circumstance and upbringing were quite far apart from mine.

I think that there's a good deal of 'depth' to the narrative in Fun Home, which at some point I'd like to take apart and examine to see how it ticks. But for now after a first read-through I'll just settle for calling it one of the best comics of 2006.

Rating: 4.5 (of 5). ( )

Bechdel’s memoir of growing up with her closeted gay father in rural Pennsylvania, where her parents taught English, and father worked in the family funeral home, or “Fun Home” as she and her brothers referred to it, might be characterized as tragi-ironic, more than tragicomic. It’s a melancholy childhood of family secrets and alienation. It’s the story of her father’s death—was it a suicide or an accident—and of her relationship to him.

It’s constructed as a series of chapters that are meditative revelations, each one building on and revealing more than the previous one. Each one uses a different work of literature and its author as the reflecting mirror for her family life: the Greek myth of Icarus and his father Deadalus, A Happy Death by Albert Camus, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or as she translates it, “this means not just lost but ruined, undone, wasted, wrecked, and spoiled” (page 119), The Wind in the Willows, “The Ideal Husband” and “The Importance of Being Ernest” by Oscar Wilde, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Homer’s original. Her reason for this abundance of literary references, she explains after comparing her father to a character in an F. Scott Fitzgerald book and her mother to one “right out of Henry James,” (page 66) “I employ these allusions to James and Fitzgerald not only as descriptive devices, but because my parents are most real to me in fictional terms. And perhaps my cool aesthetic distance itself does more to convey the Arctic climate of our family than any particular literary comparison.” (page 67)

Part of the irony is that she learned of her father’s hidden sexuality, only as a result of her coming out to her parents as a lesbian when she was in college only four months before he died. A few weeks after her letter home, her mother, not her father, called to tell her about it. Instead of an opportunity to talk about a common experience, it became another instance of their antipodal relationship. As she puts it earlier in the book, “I was Spartan to my father’s Athenian. Modern to his Victorian. Butch to his Nelly. Utilitarian to his Aesthete.” (page 15).

Yet the book begins and ends with scenes of her father catching her as she leaps into his arms. She has said that she is not angry with her father, although her affection for him reveals itself more clearly in her interviews with the press, than in the book. Her statement there is, “His bursts of kindness were as incandescent as his tantrums were dark.” (page 21)

This is a highly lauded book that deserves every bit of its praise. Fun Home is a masterpiece of memoir drawn in black and white cartoons tinted in shades of blue. ( )

http://www.bostonbibliophile.com/2009... ( )

An Epic Journey Toward Honesty

When your father is an exacting home renovator, meticulous interior decorator, local mortician, high shcool English teacher, and closeted homosexual, who you suspect likely had sexual relations with adolescent boys - if you're like most autobiopic authors these days, then you'd probably write your own private hyperbolic "Running With Scissors," throwing everything up against the wall, and crudely splattering your immediate family's history across the pages of your tunnel-visioned, self-promoting, and sensational memoir. But Alison Bechdel is neither an ordinary author nor a poorly educated one. She has both an independently crafted intellect and a capable library of classic literary sources and themes. She does not choose to focus on minutia or overly far-reaching causalities. Her first autobiography is a corncopia of expertly-coordinated art forms, carved into a concise, gravitational, and enlightening narrative.

I highly recommend not only buying and reading this book, but I also encourage studying Bechdel's perspectives, reasoning connections, and causal theories.

This book is a modern heroic quest to find meanings, understandings, and truths in intimate behaviors, wants, and relationships.

Many authors focus on picturesquely and emotionally describing the abnormalities of their past. Bechdel is fully capable of parroting those common abilities. But her aims are further reaching and more well-intended than simply trying for accurate multi-sensory recollection. She goes happily beyond and effectively reveals the origins of some of her creative forces. She sympathetically and honestly portrays the cultural, familial, and private paradoxes that likely disabled so many of her (and our) loved ones who are not ordinary in their desires.

Anyone who incorrectly thinks women can't be visually-centric need only read this book. Bechdel's visual memory is both astounding and rewarding for the rest of us. And her other areas of memory, from smells to feelings to current events to literary quotes in her educational development are indicative of an artist who tries to consider, evaluate, and remember more than most people do. She does not filter her memories through rose colored glasses, but she does effectively step outside status quo lenses to make her own evaluations and portrayals.

Reading some of the recent popular homosexual memoirs, a person might think homosexuals are NOT predominantly driven by love or desire, but rather driven by poor experiences, revenge, whistleblowing, or hatred. Where most authors blame their family and past relationships for their own problems, Bechdel does not. She sees more perspectives and she is better educated than most. Bechdel chooses to not simply blame others for her past OCD, inabilities, and abnormalities, even while she illustrates capably the environment in which those conditions arose.

The title "Fun Home" probably has many intended meanings, like Jeannette Wells memoir entitled "The Glass Castle" has many transparent meanings. Both memoirs speak of fun times, but I think Bechdel sees even more of the good intentions in her father's "mad" pursuits than Wells perceived. Both fathers showed flashes of brilliance mixed with Achilles Heels so notorious, it's a wonder they could walk at all sometimes. And in Wells' defense, at least Bechdel's father was better read and less often intoxicated.

The title "Fun Home" is not singularly intended with negative or sarcastic connotations. Alison Bechdel shows us how she had fun growing up, as much fun as a person could have dealing with the ever present spoken and unspoken, addressed and unaddressed familial conflicts constantly battling in her home.

I think it would be insufficent to call this a young woman's "coming of age" book. It may be more accurate to say this book is about a family coming of age. And I think the publication of this beautiful story is an assertive exercise in encouraging societal sensibilities to come of age.

Bechdel does not seek to excuse all of her father's behaviors, but rather to help others understand them. She wants more people to understand what can happen to very intelligent and talented people when they are incorrectly trained to believe that some of their primary drives and loves are sinful, shameful, or should be killed or hidden. She writes:

"I suppose a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cummulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death. Ulysses, of course, was banned for many years by people who found its honesty obscene."

I felt pretty good that I was able to not cry while reading the book. But after I read the last page, the tears just flowed. ( )

Alison Bechdel’s coming of age tale is a difficult one. It was easy to sympathize with young Alison who must have been like a ship lost at sea. The coldness of her family home was palpable and mirrored that of the funeral home where her father worked. Other than being indentured servants to their father’s fastidious home decor projects, there were no signs of outright abuse, but the lack of affection would be enough to cause any child psychological problems. It would have been easy for Bechdel to paint her father as the patriarchal tyrant, but she manages to make him somewhat sympathetic. Her ability to find humor in an otherwise grim story and her wonderful artwork kept me wanting to read more. ( )

The stern look on her father’s face as if he’s always angry always ready to commit suicide totally hated his life and how he wasn’t doing what he was good at, wasn’t doing what he really loved (decorating houses) instead he was chopping up dead bodies and teaching them. I mean and teaching English in school. The wishes of the young girl are so viable of how a child would want her father to treat her yet she never gets quite what she fulfills with the man. With the animation style and the practical monotone voice of the narrator, Fun Home is one of the most captivating and current ways of reading so fitting for my generation. (1984+--the year not the book)
Your humble narrator of course is still a fan of ‘normal’ books, of course but it makes a nice change and I am very invested in the expressions on each characters face, just one of the many intimate details Aillson Bechdel illustrates so well. Literally. Another element is of course how frank she is about her life’s story. She grew up in a very classic American style and the Freudian elements of ‘everything that happens in your childhood affects your adult life” are so well displayed. When the main character transitioned from a child to a college student (p.44-47) I thought it was a younger version of her dad and it was now a flashback scene. Then I realized it was her dad she was talking about getting hit by a truck, obviously it made sense. That scene is brilliant because of the one straight before that about how her dad set her up to embrace death.
In fact, Fun House is almost a perfect artistic impression of Freud’s theory being lived out in an American society that adapted so many of his theories yet still over a century and a half since he wrote his ideas. Talk about symbiotics. In conclusion: Fun Home is the best ‘Family Tragicomic’ I have ever read!

Freudian elements she deals with:
Happiness that her father is dead (Oedipus cycle)
Catharsis of shaking off the funeral director and throwing the “cheesy flag” on her dad’s grave (p. 53)
The father dealing with an unmanageable super-ego with little cathexis (p. 60)
The father’s Gatsby complex (farm boy to prince p. 63)
Overcoming her father’s authority by surpassing him as ‘the man’ and not being a sissy; not planting flowers, playing sports, watching men with guns (p. 95-98) however not interacting sexually with men.
“Juggled his public appearance and private reality, the evidence is simultaneously hidden and revealed.
She is also constantly alluding her sexuality to her cultural surroundings and not an innate feeling which is very real and is not spoken about so openly in a non-gay community. Pg. 104 is a good example
A part of her feels like she is helping her dad live vicariously through her because she was able to stand out and be a lesbian where he had to suppress his homosexuality and kept it very private. ( )

I enjoyed reading this highly-honored book even though I could not identify at all with the writer, since I had a wonderful relationship with my father and did not have to face the angst that the author did in coming to grips with her sexual orientation. According to the cover, Time called this book “brilliant” and “hilarious.” “Brilliant” it is, but “hilarious?” I don’t think so. Was it because it is in comic strip form? There was some levity in it, but the author deals with two very sobering subjects in a very respectful way. (Caution: explicit depictions of sex) ( )

Definately worth the buzz. Probably not the best comic book I've ever read, but it's on the top 5 list. ( )

Very touching and well drawn memoir from the person behind Dykes to Watch Out For. ( )

To call this a "coming of age tale" would be inaccurate. Written as a memoir, Bechdel describes how her self-discovery and acceptance of her sexuality helped her understand her father and his demons. The artwork is absolutely excellent, both humorous and thoughtful. The reader feels as if he or she is flipping through an old family scrapbook. The intimacy of the story, language, and pictures creates a strong connection between the reader and the characters. Bechdel is able to balance some of the gut-wrenching moments in the book with humor that does not negate the sorrow but alleviates some of the pain.
An excellent story about family and the journey to self-discovery. As Bechdel begins to accept the fact that she is a lesbian, she is able to find greater compassion and understanding for her father who (despite being married) is also gay. ( )

This is a wonderfully open autobiographical account of growing up in a difficult family. While the author's coming out does play a part, this narrative concentrates on her relationship with her father - an incredibly difficult, damaged, and damaging man. What is astonishing to me is that tucked in with the tragedy, the maybe suicide, the secret life, the forcible shaping and moulding of his home and family into odd forms, the author manages to communicate affection, and in same cases event respect for her father's love of beauty.
The bluish tone to the art suits the mood very well, and she uses extracts of letters and diaries to great effect. This was an engrossing read. ( )

This was my very first graphic novel. I had this book on my wishlist because I'd seen a good review somewhere, but I realize now that I really had no clue what this book was all about beforehand. Since this was my first graphic novel, I don't have anything to compare it to, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. The fact that it's a memoir makes it completely enthralling & the illustrations feel very real-to-life coming from the author herself. Sad and yet enlightening, I thought it was an excellent medium for describing Bechdel's coming-to-terms with her relationship with her father & with herself. ( )