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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic Paperback - 2007

by Alison Bechdel

Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and funny, readers are drawn into a daughters complex yearning for her father. Apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books.


Summary

A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books.This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form.

From the publisher

CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED, NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Time Magazine #1 Book of the Year - National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist -
Winner of the Stonewall Book Award - Double finalist for the Lambda Book Award -
Nominated for the
GLAAD Media Award
Alison Bechdel's groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir that charts her fraught relationship with her late father.
Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the "Fun Home." It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve. In her hands, personal history becomes a work of amazing subtlety and power, written with controlled force and enlivened with humor, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail.

First line

LIKE MANY FATHERS, MINE COULD OCCASIONALLY BE PREVAILED ON FOR A SPOT OF "AIRPLANE."

Details

  • Title Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
  • Author Alison Bechdel
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition [ Edition: Repri
  • Pages 240
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Mariner Books Classics, Boston, Ma, U.s.a.
  • Date 2007-06-01
  • Illustrated Yes
  • Features Illustrated, Price on Product - Canadian, Table of Contents
  • ISBN 9780618871711 / 0618871713
  • Weight 0.85 lbs (0.39 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.7 in (22.61 x 14.99 x 1.78 cm)
  • Ages 15 to UP years
  • Grade levels 10 - UP
  • Themes
    • Topical: Lgbt
  • Library of Congress subjects Fathers and daughters, Graphic novels
  • Dewey Decimal Code B

Media reviews

"[Alison Bechdel] hits notes that resemble Jeanette Winterson at her best...She's made a story that's quiet [and] dignified." Publishers Weekly, Starred

"[With] uncommon richness [and] depth...[Fun Home] shares as much in spirit with...other contemporary memoirists of considerable literary accomplishment." Kirkus Reviews, Starred

“Alison Bechdel – she’s one of the best, one to watch out for." --Harvey Pekar

"If David Sedaris could draw, and if Bleak House had been a little funnier, you'd have Alison Bechdel's Fun Home." --Amy Bloom, author of A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

"Brave and forthright and insightful--exactly what Alison Bechdel does best." --Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina

"Stupendous...mesmerizing...The details...are devastatingly captured by an artist in total control of her craft." --Chip Kidd, author of The Cheese Monkeys

"One of the very best graphic novels ever." Booklist, ALA, Starred Review

"Fun Home must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced. . . . pioneering." --Sean Wilsey The New York Times Book Review

TIME Best Book of the Year: "A masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other." Time Magazine

"One of the best memoirs of the decade ... at once hypercontrolled and utterly intimate." --New York Magazine, 10 Best Books of 2006 New York Magazine

"Fun Home must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced ... a pioneering work." --Sean Wilsey The New York Times Book Review

"A revelation ... feels like a true literary achievement, something with characters who baffle and disappoint and break hears the way people do in life and in the best of prose." Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Graphic storytelling at its most profound." --a Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of 2006 The Los Angeles Times

Citations

  • Entertainment Weekly, 03/06/2015, Page 72
  • Library Journal, 03/01/2014, Page 48

About the author

Alison Bechdel's cult following for her early comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For expanded wildly for her family memoirs, the best-selling graphic memoir Fun Home, adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical, and Are You My Mother? Bechdel has been named a MacArthur Fellow and Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont, among many other honors. Her new memoir, The Secret to Superman Strength, is forthcoming in 2021.
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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

by Bechdel, Alison

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