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Loading... Fun Home (original 2006; edition 2006)by Alison Bechdel
Work detailsFun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (2006)
  
» 39 more Top Five Books of 2013 (239) Female Author (146) Books Read in 2020 (277) 100 New Classics (36) Books Read in 2014 (142) Top Five Books of 2014 (513) Top Five Books of 2016 (644) Favourite Books (834) Books Read in 2015 (1,429) Books Read in 2019 (1,548) 2000s decade (47) Read This Next (44) Female Protagonist (715) Swinging Seventies (75) Unshelved Book Clubs (76) No current Talk conversations about this book. A great, great read that wow'd me from beginning to the end; probably my favourite non-fiction graphic novel (and I've read a lot of the "classics"). It strikes an interesting and poignant balance between self-reflection, literary allusions, observations about others and their influence on one's own life... Summarising the book with big themes like "identity," "sexuality," "family," or "memory" doesn't render justice to what skillfully, intelligently, and movingly Bechdel achieves with Fun Home. It never gets self-indulgent nor overly critical (as I found sometimes with other memoirs like Sartre's Les mots); it remains compassionate but authentic, approchable and relevant yet still deeply personal, clever and brainy without being pedantic. The kind of book I'm likely to pick up again. (  ) lochinb | Jun 3, 2021 |  This memoir can probably best be described as a spiral, where the story turns in on itself, then jumps back out to a previous point on the spiral, then turns back in towards the center. The narrative structure is so good, giving the reader glimpses of the future, then going back to the past, then winding back to the future with new knowledge about what brought us here, then ultimately tightening everything down to a conclusion. Really great book. Great illustrations, great understanding of both storytelling and the medium of comics. ( ) evenlake | Mar 23, 2021 | I loved it. It starts as an emotionally intense look at what it's like to live in an emotionally abusive household, and then uses other literature as a lens for Bechdel to examine and re-examine and re-examine her life and her father's life. Which is, of course, a way the book invites itself to be used. That's how I used it, at least. ( ) poirotketchup | Mar 18, 2021 | Fun Home is a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel. Bechdel grew up in Pennsylvania where her family ran a funeral home they called the Fun House. Her family was a bit dysfunctional and the memoir focuses on her relationship with her father, who was a closeted gay man who had affairs with young men, and her realization that she was a lesbian. While the book dealt with some deep, dark issues, the book did have a touch of humor to break up the serious topics. It presented some complicated family relationships in a manner that was not trivialized due to the format. It is a great example of the genre of graphic memoirs. (  ) Cora-R | Jan 23, 2021 | excellent art and vocabulary that mirror the family. portrait of a family that has artifice and bubbling underneath is tragedy waiting to happen and a discovery to be made. ( ) kevix | Dec 28, 2020 |
 Bechdel’s style is straightforward. Her detailed drawings strive to present what she remembers accurately and with detail. The book is black-and-white with a blue-grey watercolor wash that provides depth and adds to the feeling of memory.
This book takes its place alongside the unnerving, memorable, darkly funny family memoirs of Augusten Burroughs and Mary Karr. It's a father-daughter tale perfectly suited to the graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian house, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned 'fun home,' as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive.--From publisher description. No library descriptions found. 
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Wikipedia in English (4)
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