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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by [Alison Bechdel]

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Alison Bechdel

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic Kindle & comiXology

by Alison Bechdel (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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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.

Length: 232 pages	Book 1 of 1 in Fun Home	Age Level: 15 and up
Grade Level: 9 and up

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Fun Home

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Editorial Reviews

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.

--This text refers to the paperback edition.

Review

"A splendid autobiography...refreshingly open and generous." —Entertainment Weekly

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

"A masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other." —Time Magazine

"Graphic storytelling at its most profound." —Los Angeles Times, Favorite Book of the Year

"The great writing of the twenty-first century may well be found in graphic novels and nonfiction....Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is an astonishing advertisement fro this emerging literary form." —USA Today

"Brilliant and bittersweet." —The Boston Globe

"Beautiful combines the mundane with the macabre, adding doses of wry, poignant humor on every page." —Washington Post

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

"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

"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

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

"Masterful...an enormously successful work." —Village Voice

"A staggeringly literate and revealing autobiography." —Seattle Times

"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

"[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

"One of the very best graphic novels ever." —Booklist, ALA, Starred Review --This text refers to the paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This autobiography by the author of the long-running strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, deals with her childhood with a closeted gay father, who was an English teacher and proprietor of the local funeral parlor (the former allowed him access to teen boys). Fun Home refers both to the funeral parlor, where he put makeup on the corpses and arranged the flowers, and the family's meticulously restored gothic revival house, filled with gilt and lace, where he liked to imagine himself a 19th-century aristocrat. The art has greater depth and sophistication that Dykes; Bechdel's talent for intimacy and banter gains gravitas when used to describe a family in which a man's secrets make his wife a tired husk and overshadow his daughter's burgeoning womanhood and homosexuality. His court trial over his dealings with a young boy pushes aside the importance of her early teen years. Her coming out is pushed aside by his death, probably a suicide. The recursively told story, which revisits the sites of tragic desperation again and again, hits notes that resemble Jeanette Winterson at her best. Bechdel presents her childhood as a "still life with children" that her father created, and meditates on how prolonged untruth can become its own reality. She's made a story that's quiet, dignified and not easy to put down. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* This is a father and daughter story. Bechdel's mother and two brothers are in it, of course, but Bruce Bechdel had the biggest impact on his eldest child and so is naturally the other main character in her autobiographical graphic novel. Emotionally and physically reserved, to the point of brusqueness, he busied himself restoring--and then some--the Victorian-era house he bought for the family in the Pennsylvania town in which he was born and lived virtually all his 44 years. He enlisted the kids for never-ending interior and exterior modifications of the place in what obviously was his major creative outlet. For a living, he taught twelfth-grade English and ran the small undertaking business that occupied part of his parents' house and that the kids called the fun home. Bechdel doesn't even hint about how ironic she and her brothers meant to be, because she is a narrative artist, not a moralist or comedian, in this book and because she has a greater, real-life irony to consider. After disclosing her lesbianism in a letter home from college, her mother replied that her father was homosexual, too. Alison suddenly understood his legal trouble over buying a beer for a teenage boy, all the teen male "helpers" he had around the house, and his solo outings during family vacations to New York. Bechdel's long-running Dykes to Watch Out For is arguably the best comic strip going, and Fun Home is one of the very best graphic novels ever. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From Bookmarks Magazine

That Alison Bechdel kept a childhood journal made Fun Home a perhaps more true-to-life project than it would have been if she'd relied on memory alone. A powerful graphic novel-memoir, Fun Home documents Bechdel's childhood experiences and coming-of-age as a woman and lesbian. At its center lies her heartbreaking relationship with her distant father, which produces emotionally complex and poignant reflections and clean, bitonal images. While detractors cited confusing chronology and repetition of events, literary buffs enjoyed the challenging references to Albert Camus, James Joyce, and classical mythology. In the end, Fun Home "is an engrossing memoir that does the graphic novel format proud" (New York Times).

ASIN : B00DYEC8MC
Publisher : Mariner Books; Illustrated edition (June 5, 2007)
Publication date : June 5, 2007
Language : English
File size : 404831 KB
Text-to-Speech : Not enabled
Enhanced typesetting : Not Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Not Enabled
Print length : 232 pages
Lending : Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #17,345 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1 in LGBTQ+ Graphic Novels (Kindle Store)
- #2 in Graphic Novel Biographies & Memoirs
- #3 in Art Book Graphic Novels

Customer Reviews:
1,866 ratings

Customer reviews

5 star		74%
4 star		12%
3 star		7%
2 star		3%
1 star		4%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Fun Home

Reviewed in the United States on December 8, 2015

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I first heard of Fun Home when I read an article about how it was on the summer reading list for incoming freshman at Duke University and a group of students were boycotting it. They said it was pornographic and that its homosexual themes violated their Christian moral beliefs. Learning a group is trying to ban or boycott a book is one sure way to get me interested in reading it.

Fun Home is Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir of her life growing up. Fun home is what she and her brothers called the family-owned funeral home her dad ran. This was the first adult graphic novel I’ve read. (And by adult, I mean for grown-ups, NOT porn.) I was really surprised how drawn into it I was. I didn’t realize that characters could be so defined in the graphic format. I really felt for Alison, having to grow up with such distant, detached parents. Her pain and confusion over her father’s death jumps off the page.

The only way that Alison and her father relate to one another is through a mutual love of books and reading. Fun Home is peppered with literary references and comparisons that went completely over my head. Once again I’m pulling the “I was an accounting major so I didn’t read any classics in college card”. If you have, you may enjoy the references and Alison’s book will have even more meaning for you. However, I still liked this book a lot anyway.

There were a few nude drawings in this book, when Alison figures out she’s a lesbian and starts having relationships with women. However, Alison is a talented illustrator and they looked like works of art in my opinion. If the scenes had been described using words, they would have been much more graphic. I am applying Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” test of obscenity and this ain’t it.

As far as the homosexual themes in the book goes, yes this is a memoir written by a lesbian about her relationship with her gay dad. It’s a gay book. But isn’t one of the great things about reading learning about people who are different than you? Reading helps one develop a deep sense of empathy. Maybe you might even learn that people you once thought were evil are not. Maybe that’s a scary thought for some people and they would rather live in their insulated bubbles. I’m glad I’m not one of those people. However, I should thank the students at Duke for alerting me to this book’s existence.

Put Fun Home on your list of challenged books that must be read!

115 people found this helpful

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badDog4

Excellent Memoir

Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2019

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This was not at all what I was expecting.

Something about those cutesy drawings gave me the pre read impression that this was going to be funny, quirky, maybe light hearted. No. An intense examination of the author’s own family, ugly gashes of violence, mental illness, a father leading a sordid double life, an actor mother who is remote and hard to know. There’s also the author’s discovery of her sexuality via a very intellectual route during college.

Images stay with me of isolated siblings, alone but together in a museum-like Gothic Revival home where her father treated the antique furniture like his children and his children like castoff furniture. A crazy set of drawings where she kisses her father’s knuckles because she feels the need to show affection but has never been shown how. There are happy times of vacations and children at play but even those are odd because of the backdrop of the family’s funeral home.

I thought the truest part of the book were the drawings of the author as a little girl compulsively counting and gesturing in public to ward off bad luck and sadly, scribbling symbols over her own journal words as if to scratch out herself in some kind of way.

What will stay with me is the ever present longing to connect that’s prevalent throughout the book. I need to reread this one at some point because there’s too much for only one look.

12 people found this helpful

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Poignant Autobiographical Graphica Novel

Reviewed in the United States on July 26, 2015

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I don't typically read graphic novels, not because I dislike the genre or haven't read some brilliant graphic novels in the past. My predisposition is toward novels and history/non-fiction. In the case of "Fun Home", I listen to the podcast "Books on the Nightstand" and this was one of their recommendations. I've had great experiences when reading one of their recommendations and hadn't read a graphic novel in several years so decided to change things up.

"Fun Home" is an entertaining and poignant autobiography of Bechdel's childhood. Her family owns a funeral home in a small town so her father works as an English teacher, her mother an actress. They buy a charming fixer-upper which her father lovingly devotes much of his spare time to restoring to grandeur often enlisting Alison for assistance. Much more, this is Alison's story of growing up as she starts to realize she is a lesbian, her coming out as well as learning that her father was a "closeted" gay man. Her father dies after being hit by a car and Alison wonders whether this was an accident or suicide, unable to fully express himself and his true sexual orientation. It is also about the unspoken bonds between Alison and her dad after she tells her parents she is gay --- she can never quite come to ask him about his sexual orientation and he never directly broaches the subject with her before his death. The illustrations only serve to enhance the development of the Alison and her family and deepen the emotional engagement with their struggles. There are moments of sadness, but more moments of joy and discovery to be found in this exceptional autobiography.

29 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Janie U

Words and text working together perfectly

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 22, 2018

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I chose this for my bookclub to read as an example of a graphic novel, none of us ever having read one before. I quickly realised that this was a memoir which made it even more interesting.
From the start there are pointers that her life is developing into a tragic tale. We are left in no doubt that her father was a complicated man with many internal torments.
The language is rich and luxurious with the great use of some unusual words (one or two even had me looking up definitions).
I've now read a few graphic books and think this book is put together brilliantly. The words and pictures both add to each other. There is great detail in the graphics as well, many of which add more to the story than the words can alone.
There is much tragedy but it is related in a blackly humorous way (man times crossing back and forward the line between comedy and tragedy).
The narrative sections break into four types: the overall story telling, dialogue in speech bubbles, occasional explanatory notes and labels highlighting an element of a drawing.
Essentially the book is about a father and daughter relationship. They struggle to come to terms with their differences whilst refusing to acknowledge their obvious similarities. Much of the commonality is around literature and the arts, leading to a few points where the author relies too heavily on literary references. However, I very much liked the reliance on the artistic talents in the family, particularly the mother's acting which allows her to step away from her real world.
What strikes me most about this book is the depth of emotion that is written into every, carefully chosen, word. It can be a cliche to say that the process of writing is cathartic but, with this book, that feels appropriate.

8 people found this helpful

Daljeet Singh

Every flick of her pen tells part of the story

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 31, 2017

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I've just finished this beautiful graphic novel. It's an inspiring read that's so incredibly well crafted and carefully illustrated, every flick of her pen tells a part of the story, every word placed as precisely as her father would each item in their home.

She was a literature student, so if you're a literature buff you will probably enjoy a lot of references that likely went straight over my head. I'm guessing there was probably a lot deeper thematic references I'm missing not actually being as well read as I'd like to be.

But even if you aren't a literary buff, it's a story that takes you on an proper journey and by the end of it my heart is with hers and I feel the beauty of the pain from which she writes, without ever screaming about. Couldn't recommend it more.

4 people found this helpful

V. G. Harwood

The space between the picture frame

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 15, 2015

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I really enjoyed this graphic memoir; the pictures are lovely - so well-drawn - there is one of the author as she represents herself walking up through some woods with her father, and it is such a beautiful picture. Oh, to be able to draw like that1

The story is compelling as well, a memoir told in a comic strip format which works really well. The author/artist is relating the story of her childhood growing up with her father and mother in her family's funeral home. Her father is also a homosexual and conducts a number of affairs with younger men throughout his married life. The story, the author seems keen to inform the reader, is her interpretation of her history. There is, it seemed to me, a covert allusion to the fact that some of her story might be false, because, as we all know, memory can be flawed and one can only ever represent one understanding of it. I loved the way her father seemed to see her family life (according to her) as "a still life with children" - family seemed, to him, to be a work of art - as was her father's refurbishment of the house they lived in. This is an unusual memoir and one I would definitely recommend.

2 people found this helpful

Bill Sikes

Pretty classy

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 14, 2017

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I've not read many graphic stories. (The closest I can think of is logicomix.) This is more of an autobiography, focusing on the author's father. I thought it was intriguing and engaging. I imagine it will stick in my head for a fair while. I found the drawings very transparent; they weren't screaming "look at my drawing", but "look at what my drawings are of". I really liked that, the portrayal of the characters, the balance of pictures and text, and the author's perspective.

2 people found this helpful

Don'tWantToWrite

Fun Home: Graphic And Novel

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 23, 2015

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The graphic novel is a genre not widely associated with serious subjects. It’s a longer comic book for readers who prefer their cartoons with hardback covers and a hefty price tag. But that presumption misses the point of the graphic novel by a long stretch, not least when it’s Alison Bechdel doing the storytelling.

Her 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home actually represents two genres, one that is not widely read and another that is growing in strength, so much so that US colleges have added it to their reading lists for liberal arts students. Fun Home attracted criticism from more conservative students, who disagree with its sexual content and imagery. The fact that colleges believe students can learn from a graphic novel—and the novel can cause such a stir—is a testament to its ingenuity.

Bechdel sees no need to tell the story of her father’s death, the emergence of her own homosexuality and everything that led up to the two in a linear fashion. Instead, she zips between her family home, the title funeral home, her college classes and trips away with her mother, father and siblings, choosing to join the chapters by her feelings towards particular situations or events rather than in any traditional sequence. The story centres around the death of Bechdel’s father and what it means to her. Bechdel’s journeys into the past reveal a father who preferred to restore houses than spend time with his daughter, and who slept with men, often his students, behind the back of his wife and family.

Fun Home delivers the tragedy in Bechdel’s life with comedic aplomb, illustrating key scenes from her childhood and adolescence in a cartoon style that harks back to the comics that came before. Particularly revealing is a snapshot of a certain letter from father to daughter, because his indecipherable handwriting means all the reader has is the narrator’s reflections. Lacking context, Bechdel’s narrator must be relied upon, and the next page reveals the last time she saw her father, in an illustration that shows them getting on as well as they can, sat next to each other playing the piano. “It was unusual, and we were close. But close enough,” remarks Bechdel’s narrator.

The strength of Fun Home is in its yearning to understand fatherhood and sexuality and everything else that goes on during the chronicled period of Bechdel’s life. Her narrator never settles on definitive conclusions—it’s not entirely clear if Bechdel’s father committed suicide or was the victim of an accident—but prefers somewhere in the middle, which is both a challenge and a joy for the reader, who too wants to understand where Bechdel’s narrator is coming from, and is likely going next.

Besides the cartoonish illustrations and dry dialogue is a narration that touches on literature of all kinds, as Bechdel likens texts and passages to points in her own time. What’s created is a flowing story that peaks and troughs and runs wild and streams slowly, as Bechdel’s narrator attempts to grow closer to her father, and if not, understand him, and failing that, hate him. When that doesn’t work, she learns to be like him. And the reader is left wondering if there was really anything wrong at all.

2 people found this helpful