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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin List price: $19.95 70 new, used & collectible available from $5.85. |
| 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. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, 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 his 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 adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive. |
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Customer Reviews / Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
| Read this book. It was both challenging and easy to read. compelling story, amazing vocabulary, a great gift for young people studying history, psychology, graduate students and people who were once graduate students. just wonderful. |
| Bechdel rocks as a comic artist for over 20 years. This book is a huge, surprising, candid, funny, serious, revealing slice of her real (you-can't-make-this-stuff-up) life. (and the art is so pleasant) If you like this kind of work, spend the ten bucks, you won't be sorry. PS try to read it without reading about the story/plot in a review, the story really twists and turns and all that will be lost if you hear about it in some blunt summary! |
| I was required to read this novel for my Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgendered experience course. I loved the graphics, her choice in detail gives the reader additional information that just what is discussed, and adds to the overall emotional effect. She chose an interesting organization, the novel moves through different memories and still retains a focus. She infuses her writing with literary and mythical references which contribute meaning and entertain. This was the first graphic novel I have read, as well as the first novel concerning the LGBT community. It was a great quick read, and I would recommend it to any one. |
| The fact that it's a graphic novel isn't what makes Alison Bechdel's revelatory memoir about growing up in a funeral home with her mother, siblings and her erudite, closeted father such a dazzler, though without it (she is the author of the syndicated comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For), one would miss this artist's wry, loopy visual depiction of the rural upstate where she grew up, and the encyclopedic ambivalence of faces that often convey more human truth than those of flesh and blood. But it's her literary voice that makes Fun Home a must-read bildungsroman in this age of Proposition 8 and America's morality wars: it's naked, full of wit and pain in its observance of one woman's gay coming of age. |
| With relatively few exceptions, one of the reasons I haven't really gone back to the graphic novel scene has been that empty feeling after going through dozens of pages of pictures without the sense of having really "read" anything. This isn't a pot-shot at the genre, but rather an expression of the frustration that comes with buying something that costs $35.00 but feeling like I got about $10 worth of reading out of it. This could be a crass way of looking at the problem, but it's rare that artwork can cover up poor storytelling. I held off reading Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home" until recently, and regret waiting since it is even better than the hype. Non-graphic-novel types frequently name drop specific titles to appear a bit more edgy (can't do that with "Watchmen" anymore, though, as it's now a movie) and in the know, so I stayed away from "Fun Home" for fear of overexcited buzz. This is definitely not the case. Bechdel is not only a compelling artist but an unexpectedly powerful writer as well, a combination that is sadly missing from many of her contemporaries. You could probably just put out the text of "Fun Home" and still be moved. basic, basic plot: This is a memoir of Bechdel's childhood in the shadow of her closeted father's serious struggles to stay closeted (ultimately resulting in his suicide), and the connections she makes to the discovery of her own homosexuality. This is by no means light reading, but you will have no trouble sitting down to it. Even though you know how it ends, you know that the point is how things got there. This is perhaps a game we all play with our own dissections of past events, and fortunately Bechdel gives her own story a worthwhile examination that we have been invited to. I'm so pleased that I finally got around to reading it. I am greatly surprised at this sense of satisfaction after reading the book. I don't feel at all like I just looked at a skimpy collection of pictures. This book isn't very long, but you definitely leave with the sense of having read a meaty story that even demands another visit, even as you wish that things had been easier for the Bechdels. |
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
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