Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic [Paperback]

Alison Bechdel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2006

One of the most eagerly anticipated graphic memoirs of recent years, "Fun Home" is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Alison 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 the 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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[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
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About the Author

Alison Bechdel has been a careful archivist of her own life and kept a journal since she was ten. Since 1983 she has been chronicling the lives of various characters in the fictionalised Dykes To Watch Out For strip, 'one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period' (Ms). The strip is syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers, translated into multiple languages, and collected into a book series with a quarter of a million copies in print. Four of her books have won Lambda Literary Awards for Humor, and The Indelible Alison Bechdel won a Lambda Literary Award in the biography/autobiography category. Bechdel lives near Burlington, Vermont.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape; Second Printing edition (October 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0224080512
• ISBN-13: 978-0224080514
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #154,554 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)