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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic Paperback – June 5, 2007

by Alison Bechdel (Author)
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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.
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Previous page
  1. Part of Series
    Fun Home
  2. Print length
    232 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    Mariner Books Classics
  5. Publication date
    June 5, 2007
  6. Reading age
    15 years and up
  7. Dimensions
    6 x 0.67 x 9 inches
  8. ISBN-10
    0618871713
  9. ISBN-13
    978-0618871711
  10. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

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 —

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 New York Times bestselling and Time magazine #1 Book of the Year graphic memoir Fun Home, adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical, and Are You My Mother? Most recently, The Secret to Superman Strength was named a New York Times Best Graphic Novel of 2021. Bechdel has been named a MacArthur Fellow, among many other honors.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books Classics; Reprint edition (June 5, 2007)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 232 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0618871713
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0618871711
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 15 years and up
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.67 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:

About the author

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Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel

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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 fictionalized “Dykes to Watch Out For” strip, “one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period” (Ms.). The strip is syndicated in 50 alternative newspapers, translated into multiple languages, and collected into a book series with a quarter of a million copies in print. Utne magazine has listed DTWOF as “one of the greatest hits of the twentieth century.”

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
4,321 global ratings
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I am having issues with how several of the pages appear in my kindle app for iPad. Some of the pages are compressed and repeated making it confusing to read.Edit: After talking with Amazon, it was more of an issue with the kindle app itself. After uninstalling and reinstalling the application, the pages now display correctly.
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Top reviews from the United States

Peter Manda
5.0 out of 5 stars Masterpiece
Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2024
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A must read master work of literature.
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C. Wong
5.0 out of 5 stars Bad Childhood, Great Book!
Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2022
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Love graphics and love memoirs, Alison Bechel had a terrible childhood. Her father was the third generation in the funeral business. It is creepy enough to be around funeral decor and have t0 be very solemn always in public but but little kids having to prep the viewing room with the folding chairs and always be immaculare is a fun part of childhood.

I had the experience of working in the upstair apartment of a funeral home temporarily. My first husband's law practice was there. The wallpaper and carpet were funeral home style. The worst part was that I know where the caskets had been.

Alison's farher was eccentric and a perfectionist, not one to give warm hugs. He had affairs with the men he hired and I will never forgive for demanding help with the embalming of a client. Not much help but just being there with a naked corpse is not a good experience for any child.

This book is one of deeply troubled childhood. The graphics and writing was top notch and now I want to read her book about her mother.
8 people found this helpful
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ReadingRampant
4.0 out of 5 stars The balance of text and image, good and bad, was masterfully executed
Reviewed in the United States on November 11, 2017
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This is a graphic novel. I am not habituated to the format, and in a few I have read in the past have had difficulty balancing my attention between the words and pictures. Here, that was not the case. Bechdel balances serious and often detached out-of-panel sentences with engaging drawings and dialogue. The panels contribute a different element, not always illustrating what is written above or below them, creating a dynamic dual-tone. As I, with my limited exposure, understand, it is unusual to write deep reflective analysis to tell the story around the panels which show the story.

The novel is a testament to her father, and she leaves no part of him, or her own emotions about each part of their relationship, unexplored. She presents him in his entirety: the good, the bad, the disturbing, the endearing. Through reading it I could feel her love of him, and because of this sympathy I found myself not wanting to remember his baser acts. One scene expresses her frustration at the dishonest portrayal of people at funerals, where people feel that only good can be spoken about the person. She would rather have a brutally honest representation to show all her father’s flaws and all the love he received anyway. This is what this book is.

The characters are all very real. I was able to get a full idea of the father, and all the secondary characters acted believably. Of course, it is an autobiography. More than that, all of them are portrayed through compelling details, and every scene shown feels significant. The story is not told chronologically, rather it jumps between scenes relevant to each chapter’s theme. This allows every idea to be explored entirely when it is first introduced, rather than hoping it will stay in the mind of the reader until it is addressed again. Together, they paint a rich, full picture. As the story nears its end, many moments resurface, each for a single panel, drawing everything together. This pattern builds to a climax until the final scene, which is one continuous and simple moment. I had been expecting some grand finale, and the solitary scene was not quite enough. I did not feel the significance the author was trying to attribute to it. This stood out more because I had not felt that the rest of the book fell short, and the ending must, by placement, be particularly meaningful.

The balance of text and image, good and bad, was masterfully executed. My only complaint is that the ending panels did not live up to the resonance of the rest of the book. I rate this book 8/10.
2 people found this helpful
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Meka
5.0 out of 5 stars what the hell is up with this book
Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2024
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this book is seriously crazy but in a funny comic style way. I was scared at some of the pictures but I felt respect for the father. shout out to his lawyer. reverse shoutout to his students
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Kerry Walters
5.0 out of 5 stars The complexities of identity
Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2008
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I live an hour away from Beech Creek, Alison Bechdel's tiny hometown and the setting for much of her graphic memoir Fun Home. I've always found the area oppressive: dark, looming mountains casting perpetual shadows on impoverished, dying valley towns. But after reading Fun Home, I revisited Beech Creek, to see Bechdel's childhood home and the grave of her father Bruce, and to remind myself of how cruelly ironic life can be.

Bruce Bechdel, a man who loves literature (in his early days he identified with F. Scott Fitzgerald; in his final days he reads Proust), an aesthete with a taste for the baroque detail of the Victorian era, and a creative and versatile designer of interior and exterior landscapes, is born and lives in rural central Pennsylvania, running the family funeral home and teaching at the local high school. He never quite fits in. Always sun-tanned and exquisitely dressed (no plaid hunter's shirts or chewing tobacco for him), persnickety and a bit prissy, but at the same time speaking with a back-country twang, Bruce seems uncannily out of place in Beech Creek.

And he's a closeted gay man, who has occasional affairs on the side and otherwise sublimates his repressed sexuality by obsessively restoring the Victorian-era house in which Alison grew up. The tension of his closeted life makes him aloof, prone to violent temper tantrums, controlling, and sometimes cruel to both wife and children.

Alison's Bechdel's memoir of him, and the way in which her own identity both became the inverse of his and yet in many respects parallels his, is a sophisticated narrative that underscores just how complex personal identity is. Alison is who she is, just as her father was who he was, because of the convergence of Beech Creek, sexuality, alienation, fun, repression, the need to be creative, the yearning for affection, the factuality of history and the re-creation of memory. There's no formulaic happy ending here, no artificial structuring to make more sense of the relationship between herself and her father than there really was. Instead, what the reader is offered is a profound, sensitive, bittersweet effort to explore memory in search of identity--an effort which throughout is punctuated by Bechdel's references to both Proust and James Joyce--and an appreciation for the ironies of fate which make us who we become.

Other reviewers have mentioned that they read the memoir at one setting. I found it so intense that I could only take it in small portions, and even then I sometimes felt overwhelmed. For in sharing her own identity-forming memories with us, she invites us to plumb more deeply into our own. And both exercises, although potentially liberating, can also be harrowing.
8 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Elspeth Read
5.0 out of 5 stars ended too fast!
Reviewed in Canada on July 9, 2023
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Having been a Bechdel fan for many years, this book was a real treat. Understanding her life growing up as a great deal of depth to all of her other books.
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R
5.0 out of 5 stars brutally honest memoir
Reviewed in the Netherlands on August 9, 2022
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It’s poetic and brutally honest at the same time. I enjoyed my time with this memoir and feel that I have gotten to know the author better whilst reading.
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João Junior
5.0 out of 5 stars Um trabalho ao mesmo tempo incrivelmente pessoal e perturbadoramente artístico
Reviewed in Brazil on February 28, 2020
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É impressionante porque é ao mesmo tempo uma narrativa familiar muito íntima mas uma análise em alguns momentos até bem imparcial de uma pessoa tão próxima como o próprio pai. A arte é incrível, a narrativa é brilhante e se você tem problemas com seu pai você provavelmente vai chorar algumas vezes.
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Ola
5.0 out of 5 stars Dobra robota
Reviewed in Poland on March 21, 2021
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Szybka dostawa. Książka przyszła w idealnym stanie. Sposób pakowania (kartonowe pudełko typu tear off) bardzo mi przypadło do gustu.
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Lucia
5.0 out of 5 stars es muy bueno
Reviewed in Spain on August 25, 2017
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No conocía nada de la autora. Vi una reseña en el periódico, lo compré a la aventura y fue un acierto total. Es bastante peculiar y alejado de la experiencia vital de cualquier europeo. Tiene partes muy trágicas, un gran sentido del humor y una fina ironía y gáficamente es muy bueno. Tiene trozos duros de leer y más aún cuando sabes que es básicamente una historia real. Y tiene otros surrealistas en la "funeral home" que gestionaba su familia. Si te gusta la novella gráfica tipo Guy Delisle, Marjane Satrapi etc acertarás con este libro. Creo que mejor leerlo en ingles si tu ingles te lo permite. está muy bien escrito.
2 people found this helpful
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