Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Unlike Alison Bechdel's childhood home, my house lacks a library, so I usually pass books along to new homes, but I want this one with me forever. It's brilliant, affecting, stunning. Wowwee kazowee! Buy it, read it, keep it forever!

I read this for a class, and I loved it! It tells a really touching story of Alison's relationship with her father, and the medium is used really well to tell that story. It's thoughtprovoking and well done and it keeps you engaged along the way.

We just saw the musical of this in our town and it blew me away, so I bought the book. The book is even more incredible. The musical is just the tip of this iceberg of a work. I love the author's bold use of vocabulary and wide-ranging figurative language and references. I love her exploration of how this particular place shaped her father and her family. Her illustrated maps alone are such a pleasure and are so evocative. This book, this author is such a pleasure to spend time with!

We just saw the musical of this in our town and it blew me away, so I bought the book. The book is even more incredible. The musical is just the tip of this iceberg of a work. I love the author's bold use of vocabulary and wide-ranging figurative language and references. I love her exploration of how this particular place shaped her father and her family. Her illustrated maps alone are such a pleasure and are so evocative. This book, this author is such a pleasure to spend time with!

Alison Bechdel is supposed to be a revolutionary queer feminist author so I thought I'd love her most recent work, but I read the whole thing in one sitting and was so bored. There are endless literary references and if you don't have an english lit. degree you won't know what the hell she's talking about. This made it very boring to read.

Illustrations were ok I guess. Better than I could do but definitely not stunning.

Sorry Alison, I'll have to try again with your writing!

If you don't know who Alison Bechdel is, then you've been missing out on one of the best comic strip artist/writers of the last thirty-plus years.

Fun Home was first published back in 2006. It took me a decade to get around to reading it because, on a personal level, I had come to resent its existence. The reason for that was that I absolutely loved Bechdel's decades-long comic strip, the incomparable Dykes To Watch Out For, and so when she stopped doing the strip (technically "on hiatus") to work on graphic novels, I blamed Fun Home. Irrationally, true, but I feel I needed to explain why I put off reading it for so long, in spite of all the praise it was getting. Well, I finally did read it and it's amazing.

To be accurate, Fun Home falls into the category of graphic memoir rather than graphic novel as it's an account of Bechdel's early life, her somewhat dysfunctional family, and above all, the highly complex relationship she had with her father. It's told in a non-linear fashion with Bechdel providing an on-going narration as she takes us through different scenes of her life, sometimes moving forward only to jump back again later to revisit a scene shown earlier but from a different angle or with a new understanding. It's like listening to someone as they paint a highly complex picture, working first on one part of the canvas, then another, seemingly not in any order. But the picture grows as we watch and listen, and you come to realize that it had to be done this way to truly understand the experience and her own growing understanding of her early life.

There are number of poignant moments in Fun Home which Bechdel eloquently captures with her art and her words. One in particular stays with me. When she was around four or five years old, her father took her on a business trip to Philadelphia where they stopped to eat at a luncheonette. While they were there, a female truck driver made a delivery. "I didn't know there were women who wore men's clothes and had men's haircuts. But like a traveler in a foreign country who runs into someone from home - someone they've never spoken to, but know by sight - I recognized her with a surge of joy. Dad recognized her too. 'Is _that_ what you want to look like?' he asked. What else could I say? 'No.' But the vision of the truck-driving BD sustained me through the years..."

Highly, highly recommended for anyone who enjoys graphic novels (or comic strips) with engaging characters, complex story-lines and the ability to engage with the reader on a deeply intimate level. And for anyone who wants to see a detailed portrait of a daughter's relationship with dysfunctional parents and how she eventually comes to terms with them, but most especially with her deeply flawed father.

Many incoming college freshmen have been assigned to read FUN HOME: A FAMILY TRAGICOMIC during the summer between high school graduation and college. Reading a letter written by a Southern woman whose child had to read this work, I decided I wanted to know exactly what it concerns to outrage a mother whose child was about to enter college. She even questioned the $10,000 the college plans to pay to have Bechdel speak to the freshmen class about her biography. The rationale behind the assignment centers around informing the reader about the different types of people he may encounter in college and in the world. Bechdel's artwork is shocking and graphic, especially for a reader who is not expecting to be reading about and seeing images of a homosexual father and his lesbian daughter. Having taught high school English for many years, I would NOT assign this book to anyone,

dramatic autobiography of a disfunctional girl growing up in a distopic family. The drawings are a Little too explicit leaving sarcely anyting to your imagination. I found no place for me as a reader as this looks too perfect an explanation for her sexual choice. The book proved absorbing but I for one would have put more stress on the drawing skills of the author

Needed this book for a college course I was taking and I must say that it isn't something for everyone. Prompt shipping and very nice care for the book. I'd recommend it to anyone who is wanting to try reading comic style books. Thank You!

1. I didn't like the cartoons at all. They were hard to read, and the details were even harder to pick out.
2. The story was so mixed up and repetitive that you don't get to relate to the author's journey.
3. The references to all the works of literature were sophomoric at best.
4. My most important reason for disliking this book is the author's total lack of sympathy for her father. As a gay woman she should have had an inkling of how difficult it must have been for him to be gay in his time. Yes he wound up being abusive, but it was a result of having to repress his sexuality and his gender identity. I get it that not everyone in that time repressed themselves in that way, but she expressed zero sympathy for him. Of course, she shouldn't accept the abuse, but at least understand where it came from.
5. There is no hard evidence that her father committed suicide, but she persists in assuming this. My sister committed suicide, and I was angry at her for it, but my predominant emotion was sorrow that she was in such emotional pain that she felt she had no other option. The author expresses little sorrow at her father's death. It's weird to read. This whole suicide part of the story just doesn't wash. Most people deny suicide, but this author insists on it. Weird as I said.

Can not get the Kindle book to download to my kindle. Have been trying since June 4 and only getting a message on my Kindle saying "not compatible with this device". Been charged for the book so I would love to read it. Have not been able to get a refund from the store for this book. UGH!

I bought the book before seeing the musical on Broadway. I liked the musical better than the book. The book is cleverly written, but I don't enjoy reading about dysfunctional families. It is a quick read, but I would have enjoyed something better to read.

Fun Home is not a book I would've picked up for entertainment. As required reading for a class, the book tells an okay story about the author's life with her father from childhood to young adulthood. However, there are several instances where she parallels what happened to something from literature (for example, works written by Marcel Proust or James Joyce). These pretentious portions distracted me from the rest of the story and made reading the book excruciating. Meanwhile, the drawings include realistic detailing. A few sections were so realistic that I wonder if the author drew them or scanned real photos and converted them to ink drawings.

I don't know if I like this book or not because the download isn't compatible with my Kindle and the pictures and text are too small to read on the phone app. This all should have been explained in the book description! the store should reimburse anyone who purchased the Kindle version!!

It's a difficult thing to write in criticism of someone who is dead. Though it may not have been the author's intent, their judgement of the father seemed harsh and incomplete -- based on hearsay and speculation as opposed to any real understanding of his story, which she does admit to in part. It was an awkward read, which isn't always bad. I appreciated the struggle.

in addition to being completely unable to see the bottom of the page in the online version unless it was magnified so I could not read the text, I found the book altogether too full of references to other books... I read a lot, but I felt like I should have read (or re-read) a pre-assigned list before embarking on this book.

Not ready for the genre. I think of Johnson's pronouncement when Boswell asked him if a woman preacher had delivered her sermon well: "That's like asking if a dog danced well. It's enough that he danced at all."
That's what I feel about putting a value judgement on an illustrated work of literature. Like, uh, who needs it?

Sorry, I'm still too mired in print to appreciate this new art form.

The book Fun Home: A family Tragiccomic was assigned to all the students in my Engkish 122 class so I bought it here on[...]The book was delivered quickly but in good condition. I have read a few chapters so far and the story is ok. It's kinda interesting I do want to continue reading to see how it ends. Anyway an ok book so far. I admire the writer for writing so many and detialed person experiences. Anyway the book came it time before we started talking about it in class and was and is in great condition.

This was my first-ever graphic book. I selected it because I liked the title, "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic." I didn't know that Bechdel is a comic artist ("Dykes to Watch Out For") but it didn't matter, because "Fun Home," her memoir of her Pennsylvania childhood with two remote, self-involved parents, transcends that niche.

Her drawings are fantastic (think "For Better or Worse") and her writing is deep, smart, and entertaining. There are many layers: "Fun home" is short for "funeral home;" her high-school-teacher father's second job was running the family business, where she spent plenty of time. Dad was a repressed gay man, not above dalliances with his most handsome students. I really enjoyed the book, although at times there was TMI, especially in the skillful drawings. (The author face down in her girlfriend's...erm...uh...). But I think this book deserved to be called by Time Magazine the "book of the year." A bold, brave, skillful memoir.

I thought since it was a graphic novel I'd read it in an afternoon, like a comic book, but it took me four days. The drawings are so good and so detailed and witty, they warrant attention all their own. And Bechdel's writing is as solid, emotional and interesting as the best first-person essays I've read.

I normally don’t read graphic novels. They have always just seemed cartoony and juvenile to me. My diversity book club at work selected this text for our most recent discussion so I borrowed it from the library -- couldn’t bring myself to pay $10 for a graphic novel but decided I would read it. I was pleasantly surprised. The content was not at all juvenile. And the images are amazing. The author is dealing will some tough stuff from her childhood and expressing herself in both written and graphic form to help readers get at it. The themes throughout the story are ones lots of people will understand from their own lives – disappointment, loneliness, growth, death, etc. I recommend it even for the graphic novel skeptic like myself. I wish I had spent the $10 to support this author/artist and plan to go back and buy it once I have the funds.

This wasn’t exactly what I thought it would be. I found myself enjoying parts of this graphic novel and then later, I found myself wondering exactly what I was reading. It seemed to have weird transitions between scenes which threw me off and some of the topics were redundant. Overall, not a good novel for me.

Alison has been watching her parent’s interactions and the lives that they lead and she has decided that she does not want to follow the same paths that they took. Alison is set free by this realization and she’s on a mission. Our novel explodes with her new vocabulary as she conducts research, with detailed illustrations we see her new identity being exposed and Alison herself has never felt so liberated. It’s time for Alison to tell her family that she is a lesbian but the news is not as startling as what occurs after Alison’s statement.

Read Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and found myself feeling:
1. In awe by what she created and then disappointed in its storytelling, which led to boredom and ended in irritation. This was due to way she tells the story and to the mild heat wave we had last night.
2. Deeply impressed with the work of Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori for creating the musical, which adds great depth to the emotion of it.
3. Moved by the artistic talent of the graphic portion of the story, from design to layout.
In the end I'm a fan of Bechdel but not of this book. And caution others interested in it. For unless you care deeply about the works of Proust and Fitzgerald and have a keen interest in the mythology of Daedalus & Icarus you may find yourself lost or spending a lot of time looking up these references to understand what she's suggesting about the motivations of her Father and other family members.

Link to review: [...]
Review:
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Alison has had an odd relationship with her father. Not only did he work in a morgue, but he was hiding a major secret. Once she comes out of the closet and is in college, she realizes that her father was gay. This was not the only secret left for Alison to solve.

This book would be hard to read aloud given its layout. This would be one that I would point out on the bookshelf, but I would not want to expose the entire class to the content. (There is at least one sex scene.) If I were to have the class read from it, there would be specific sections and I would be sure to announce on Open House that I am available if parents would like to discuss the content of any of the books.

I thought this was an easy read and a good book. I am very naïve about what goes on in the lesbian world and I thought this was a very interesting book. After talking with a professor (who is lesbian) I realized that this was a common "finding self" track for lesbians (figuring out they were lesbians--not their fathers being gay).

View all my reviews

***

What I Want To Add:

I read this book for a college class about human sexuality in America. We had a guest professor come in and lead the class discussion on this book. It was interesting to hear this book about a lesbian's life from a lesbian. Being a straight female, I was really unsure as to what to expect or if the author's experiences were common, etc. I loved listening about everyone's different takes on the book itself.

I didn't have any major issues with this book. I would read it again if I even had the opportunity to do so. I would recommend this book for anyone in middle school or older. From what I remember there might be some adult language, and I know for sure that there was some nudity - but none of that was the main focus. This book might help some of those who are going through similar experiences (even if those people are straight or gay).

My rating: 4/5 stars

Sincerely,

Taylor

Have questions, requests, etc.? Then feel free to e-mail me at [email protected]

this graphic novel won the Eisner in 2007 for best reality based graphic novel. the Eisner is the equivalent of the Oscar in graphic novels. it was also a New York Times Notable Book. graphic novels, i believe, should also have their own category among the major book awards because to leave them out deprives readers of knowing more about this wonderful art form.

Alison Bechdel needed two talents to produce this work. She had to be both an excellent writer and artist. This should be lauded, not the basis of exclusion for major book awards. She is a lesbian and her father was bisexual. Although in other comics I have felt that the author had little to say except about personal experience in sexual preference, Alison Bechdel has a lot to say about everything. She is a very reflective person.

She and her father also communicated through literature. This becomes a fascinating part of the book as she and her father exchange these works and their thoughts concerning them. theirs was also a creative household which functioned in large part like an artist's colony. the problem with this is that it encouraged their isolation both from the world and one another. she believes he committed suicide by walking in front of a truck at age 44. there was no note left behind, however, nor is there any real evidence to support this other than the mother's intent to divorce him, voiced two weeks earlier.

i read this book digitally in adobe acrobat. i had no problem reading it in that format.

in sum, this is a fantastic book which i am sure i will reread, something i rarely do with any book.

Visit my blog with link given on my profile page here or use this phonetically given URL (livingasseniors dot blogspot dot com). Friday's entry will always be weekend entertainment recs from my 5 star the store reviews in film, tv, books and music. These are very heavy on buried treasures and hidden gems. My blogspot is published on Monday, Wednesday & Friday.

This graphic novel is a monumental autobiographical exposé by a talented artist and writer. There is no doubt about that. But I struggled to find it worth reading to its end, but I did. The author had an interesting childhood, being raised by a father and mother who were emotionally distant. Both were teachers who communicated their introverted personalities and subversive motivations vicariously through restoration of architecture and studying classical literature (her father’s pursuits) and dramatic theatre and acting on stage (her mother’s). From the paternal influence Alison found solace in literature from a young age. There seems to have been little maternal influence so this book deals mostly with the father-daughter relationship. Alison, her parents and her two younger brothers were emotionally a fractured family, each being primarily preoccupied with their own interests. Affection and heart-to-heart conversations were lacking.

The book is mostly interesting for its tell-all character—literally and graphically. Don’t be fooled by the title “Fun Home” or the “comic” element in the subtitle. Fun House is a cynical allusion to the family’s ancillary source of income: a funeral home. Alison had an early and frank introduction to naked dead bodies and the technicalities of embalming. She gradually realizes her father’s secret attraction to young boys, including underage ones. When she attends college she discovers her own sexual same gender attraction and has a lesbian relationship. Her father gets caught providing alcohol to a minor. When he dies after being hit by a truck she surmises that it was no accident but suicide. That he no longer could face living a charade.

This is definitely not a book for preadolescents (due to mature subjects) or anyone ignorant of Greek mythology, classical literature or nineteenth century writers á la Marcel Proust or James Joyce. Discussion of literary theory and references is the author’s hobby horse that she rides on the highways and byways of her thoughtstreams. Consequently her work has been endorsed by academia and included as assigned reading for students by lecturers, to the chagrin of some.

No doubt the author needed to write a memoir to get her childhood sorted about her attraction and repulsion towards her father. Hopefully she was rewarded by a personal catharsis. Personally, as a reader, I found this book tragic and depressing with very little humor to be found. Compositionally it is a staccato performance, the flow continually being interrupted by retrospective incidentals. However, it should be said that the art is good, excellent in detail. It is a tale of Alison’s self-discovery and coming out. But the shadow of her father’s controlling influence and deceptively counterfeit lifestyle looms darkly throughout.

I have wanted to read this graphic novel for a long time. It just sounded so interesting and it was very interesting. It’s incredibly well done, very funny, emotionally engaging, and full of interesting literary references.

This is an autobiographical novel by Bechdel and it was incredibly engaging and well done. Alison lives with her interior decorating obsessed father. Her father is also manic-depressive and a closet gay man. As you can imagine the marriage between Alison’s father and mother is very strained. To add to the macabre humor of it all Alison’s father owns and runs a funeral home which they call the “Fun Home”.

The book bounces between a number of times in Alison’s life. From when she was a child to an adult and back to a child. It is mainly told as a reflection of her growing up with her father after she hears about his death. She thinks about the many things she saw him doing as a child that she didn’t really understand until she got older.

Woven through all of this story is Alison’s own realization that she is a lesbian and what that confession did (or didn’t do) to her family. You get to watch as Alison’s dad struggles to form her into the perfect girl that he could never be (and Alison never wanted to be) and as Alison’s dad sneaks off for secret liaisons with other men.

The story takes place in a rural and very non-tolerant town in Pennsylvania mainly in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Bits and pieces of the history of era are woven throughout the story.

Alison’s father also had a deep love for literature, which Alison herself develops as she gets older. This provides a bridge between Alison and her father, we also get to read a lot of literature references throughout the story that have meaning to our characters’ lives.

This is a book that is easy to read and at first seems a bit meandering, but it is also incredibly thought-provoking. It does an excellent job of making you look on and reflect on your own life. I especially enjoyed how the characters’ feelings for each other ebb and flow and they go from understanding and relating to each other to hating each other. The whole thing just captures family dynamics very well (if a bit more dramatically than most families).

The drawing throughout is very well done. It’s a fairly simple style interspersed with some very detailed lifelike drawings. I pretty much read the whole book in one sitting and loved the way it ended.

This is one of those very complex and emotional novels that will make you laugh, cry, wonder and consider how society influences relationships. It’s very masterfully done and was impossible to put down.

Overall a very masterfully done graphic novel autobiography. Really I have never read anything like this before. I highly recommend it. I would recommend for older teen or adult only, there are some graphic sex scenes and discussion about sex. I bet this is one of those books they are recommending for GLBT classes in college...there is just so much in here to discuss and think about.

Ever since I read a snippet of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007 I've wanted to read the whole thing. And now, years later, I finally got around to it. I'm sorry I waited so long. The moments of deadpan hilarity are perfectly balanced with the moments of isolated desperation. I don't know if Alison Bechdel was that well-known before its publication, but she's certainly earned her celebrity status since then. In fact, as I write this, I've just learned that not only has the stage production of Fun Home opened on Broadway but it's also been nominated for 12 Tony awards.

I have a 2-rule maxim for comics: (1) Great writing can carry not-so-great artwork while great artwork cannot do the same—not even close—for lackluster writing. And (2) the quality and style of the artwork has to emotionally match the tone of the story. Fun Home hits these marks and more.

I know nothing of Bechdel's past other than what's portrayed here. I sense she was working through a few skeletons while writing Fun Home, like she was trying to make sense of what happened with the benefit of several decades of hindsight.

I stumbled upon someone talking about this book on YouTube and decided to give it a try. Wow! I never thought an autobiography could be so gripping. I read it all in one go. As a beginning English major I found the parallels to classic literature especially appealing. I also really enjoyed the illustrations, they made me feel even more immersed and even closer to the author. I thought the nonlinear timeline had surprising fluidity. You should read this book.

This memoir in graphic novel form about Alison Bechdel’s youth in a small Pennsylvania town, her transformational education in college, and her relationships with her parents is an engrossing, erudite, and profoundly thought-provoking book. There’s an important substratum of sexuality which runs throughout it but Bechdel’s point of view is wonderfully filtered through the many works of literature she’s read and appreciated, which gives it a very literary tone, not something I would have expected from a book in this form. The artwork is very effective in the service of her memories and her struggle to make sense of her family, showing, for example, the beautiful and intricately decorated home the restoration of which was a particular passion of her father. This is a very personal book and I am amazed at the maturity and the profundity of the thoughts and feelings Bechdel is able to extract from her life and put on the page.

I saw this musical at the Victory Gardens theater (the old Biograph movie theater.). It was the moving rendition of a girl’s coming of age story and her relationship with her father. She always has an unsatisfied desire to be closer to her father who she slowly realizes is a closeted homosexual. He ends up killing himself soon after she comes out as a lesbian while she is away at college.
My husband and I loved this play. The story was sweetly sad and funny at times. The songs were sometimes poignant, sometimes revelatory and sometimes pure elation.
The graphic novel is a memoir that tells this bittersweet story and illustrates it beautifully with humor and attention to detail in a variety of settings including mostly the Fun Home — a Gothic Revival house which doubles as a funeral home, a brief trip to NYC with her Dad and brothers and Alison’s experiences away at college.
I enjoyed this book very much and feel that it captured what I loved in the musical while broadening the details of the story. I think the graphic novel form was ideal for telling this story. Now I’m going to read another graphic novel by the same author about her relationship with her mother called, “Are You My Mother?”

“Fun Home” is a graphic novel that I greedily consumed in one sitting, but will be re-reading soon as I know there was a lot I missed. There is a ton packed into this book. There are references to classics and modern books I need to revisit, historical events, gender stereotypes, psychology, family dynamics, small town influences and so much more. If you only read the book, it would be impressive. The matching illustrations elevated the book to a work of art and a rich storytelling experience.

Through exploring the relationship with her father, Bechdel also integrates her uncomfortable coming of age story that was carefully documented in a series of journals. In many ways, Bechdel shares with us a truer story than most of us could share due to this unflinching documentation and dissertation of day-to-day events. I would highly recommend this to fans of unusual memoirs whether you have typically read graphic novels or not.

Who should read it? Fans of memoirs, discussion of LGBT psyche, coming of age or anyone who had a classic book that changed the course of their life.

Reading more at www.ReadingToDistraction.com or @Read2Distract

Alison Bechdel is clearly a very poignant and insightful writer, a maverick chronicler of the gay experience. Her relationship with her father is conveyed throughout Fun Home with exceptional poise and using the medium to her full advantage (shrinking panels for an important car-bound conversation late in the book for instance really works the tension). Each image is carefully rendered to provide an emotional punch and for the most part the narrative stings with mordant and merciless wit. There are a glut of literary allusions: Fitzgerald (with whom Alison's father is notably infatuated), Joyce (whose magnum opus Ulysses carries the book to its stunning circuitous conclusion), Wilde and Proust (for obvious and rather ham-fisted reasons), and a host of lesser-known queer writers like the indispensable Kate Millet. While this is certainly a story packed full of academics, most of them cruising between clandestine encounters (a house full of autistics, Bechdel playfully laments), begging for something more , there is an implication that the writer in question is maybe, possibly, a tiny tiny bit too in love with her own voice. As I read Fun Home (devoured it really in one long sitting, smiling, crying, etc), it began to become obvious that the narrative track was going to choke-slam every panel, allowing very little room for interpretation. I don't know if I've read a comic that was so light on stand-alone imagery. With the exception of a lonely three, every panel gets a description, most of them incredibly alliterative. To make matters worse, some of these panels are jammed full of language which is doubtlessly verbose, even a bit, dare I say, pedantic. Words like ledgermain and demiglace are fine, the latter used cleverly as a way to describe congealing NYC odors, but when, for instance, the locusts descend on suburbia, it is a stretch to refer to their mating as both "the ambient noise of their conjugal exertions" and "some collective libidinal impulse, unleashing it into the atmosphere." Elsewhere, referring to a drive home from camping as "a postlapasarian melancholy" seems a tad grandiose. Of course, this is a story about language, about linguists (the dictionary is drawn up more than a few times), and, as I've said, academia (Oberlin graduates should look out for a panel containing a certain library hallmark) as much as it is a story about death and gay life and father/daughter relations, so the inflated language can, to a degree, be excused, particularly when the narrative itself is so rich with identifiable themes, interesting characters, and pictorial emotion. Bechdel is without a doubt a masterful of her form and this kuntstlerroman is a perfect example of her genius. Compact but bristling with delicious prose and themes that wouldn't feel out of place in all of those books the author shamelessly name-drops.

It seems that a conservative action group and some parents are none too thrilled with the College of Charleston's choice of Fun Home as freshman reading. One conservative leader even went so far as to call the book pornographic. So how could I not read it?

Know what I found? I found a book that is a very well written story about a girl's coming of age, how she dealt with finding her own identity, how she managed to love her father despite a difficult relationship with him that was only made more difficult by the discovery that he had a secret life, and then how all of this wraps around her father's apparent suicide and the affect of that upon the entire family. Heavy, but pretty normal stuff for coming of age literature. The two things that set this work apart are that both the author / daughter and the father are gay, and that it is a graphic novel. Being a graphic novel means you get to actually see some of the situations that would just be verbally described in a regular literary work.

This is a good book. It handles real issues. It does it in a way that is both entertaining and thought provoking. This work is a microcosm of exactly what college is meant to be - an exposure to new material so that you can expand your field of knowledge, learn from that, and grow. And then hopefully, no matter what you take away from that experience, you can put that new wisdom and growth to use in your own life.

For 38 years I have been waiting for a lesbian offspring death syndrome response to my personal outrage tearing American society limb from limb. I thought all I got was alcohol joe camel split psychoslit election of trump world dimorphism in 2016, ten years after Fun Home was published in 2006. The pictures are all great Kandinsky core prints of John John Jack hack you had to be there Milton Satan Donald ICE yo momma cluelessness.

What a brilliant story. Bechdel really brings a lot of elements of coming to terms with a "taboo" sexuality that straight people just wouldn't otherwise understand or even be aware of. The graphics are charming and were very meticulously, almost obsessively, drafted to recreate as many actual items and people as possible. So the faces, the paintings, the toys, they're almost all based on photos and vivid memories. That's enough reason to buy the book right there.

If you're queer in some way, BUY. THIS. BOOK. You will laugh, you will cry, and you will come away knowing something more about yourself, even if you're straight.

I read this at a friend's request. My friend felt that it represented his own experiences well and to that end I did enjoy the book.
However, I find her writing style very annoying. It seems clear that she loves words and seeks to find interesting and efficient words. But all too often her word choice is needlessly obscure in a way that I do not feel aided the book at all.
As far as the larger story, I feel that the focus is definitely on her relationship with her father and how his own identity affected their family and her own identity as a lesbian. While it is certainly interesting, I felt the book skipped over a lot of her own story in a way that left this relationship feeling empty and made her coming out seem flat and somewhat out of place.
It is an interesting read, but not one I would recommend to someone like me who has no experience with her other work.

This graphic novel is a monumental autobiographical exposé by a talented artist and writer. There is no doubt about that. But I struggled to find it worth reading to its end, but I did. The author had an interesting childhood, being raised by a father and mother who were emotionally distant. Both were teachers who communicated their introverted personalities and subversive motivations vicariously through restoration of architecture and studying classical literature (her father’s pursuits) and dramatic theatre and acting on stage (her mother’s). From the paternal influence Alison found solace in literature from a young age. There seems to have been little maternal influence so this book deals mostly with the father-daughter relationship. Alison, her parents and her two younger brothers were emotionally a fractured family, each being primarily preoccupied with their own interests. Affection and heart-to-heart conversations were lacking.

The book is mostly interesting for its tell-all character—literally and graphically. Don’t be fooled by the title “Fun Home” or the “comic” element in the subtitle. Fun House is a cynical allusion to the family’s ancillary source of income: a funeral home. Alison had an early and frank introduction to naked dead bodies and the technicalities of embalming. She gradually realizes her father’s secret attraction to young boys, including underage ones. When she attends college she discovers her own sexual same gender attraction and has a lesbian relationship. Her father gets caught providing alcohol to a minor. When he dies after being hit by a truck she surmises that it was no accident but suicide. That he no longer could face living a charade.

This is definitely not a book for preadolescents (due to mature subjects) or anyone ignorant of Greek mythology, classical literature or nineteenth century writers á la Marcel Proust or James Joyce. Discussion of literary theory and references is the author’s hobby horse that she rides on the highways and byways of her thoughtstreams. Consequently her work has been endorsed by academia and included as assigned reading for students by lecturers, to the chagrin of some.

No doubt the author needed to write a memoir to get her childhood sorted about her attraction and repulsion towards her father. Hopefully she was rewarded by a personal catharsis. Personally, as a reader, I found this book tragic and depressing with very little humor to be found. Compositionally it is a staccato performance, the flow continually being interrupted by retrospective incidentals. However, it should be said that the art is good, excellent in detail. It is a tale of Alison’s self-discovery and coming out. But the shadow of her father’s controlling influence and deceptively counterfeit lifestyle looms darkly throughout.

I have wanted to read this graphic novel for a long time. It just sounded so interesting and it was very interesting. It’s incredibly well done, very funny, emotionally engaging, and full of interesting literary references.

This is an autobiographical novel by Bechdel and it was incredibly engaging and well done. Alison lives with her interior decorating obsessed father. Her father is also manic-depressive and a closet gay man. As you can imagine the marriage between Alison’s father and mother is very strained. To add to the macabre humor of it all Alison’s father owns and runs a funeral home which they call the “Fun Home”.

The book bounces between a number of times in Alison’s life. From when she was a child to an adult and back to a child. It is mainly told as a reflection of her growing up with her father after she hears about his death. She thinks about the many things she saw him doing as a child that she didn’t really understand until she got older.

Woven through all of this story is Alison’s own realization that she is a lesbian and what that confession did (or didn’t do) to her family. You get to watch as Alison’s dad struggles to form her into the perfect girl that he could never be (and Alison never wanted to be) and as Alison’s dad sneaks off for secret liaisons with other men.

The story takes place in a rural and very non-tolerant town in Pennsylvania mainly in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Bits and pieces of the history of era are woven throughout the story.

Alison’s father also had a deep love for literature, which Alison herself develops as she gets older. This provides a bridge between Alison and her father, we also get to read a lot of literature references throughout the story that have meaning to our characters’ lives.

This is a book that is easy to read and at first seems a bit meandering, but it is also incredibly thought-provoking. It does an excellent job of making you look on and reflect on your own life. I especially enjoyed how the characters’ feelings for each other ebb and flow and they go from understanding and relating to each other to hating each other. The whole thing just captures family dynamics very well (if a bit more dramatically than most families).

The drawing throughout is very well done. It’s a fairly simple style interspersed with some very detailed lifelike drawings. I pretty much read the whole book in one sitting and loved the way it ended.

This is one of those very complex and emotional novels that will make you laugh, cry, wonder and consider how society influences relationships. It’s very masterfully done and was impossible to put down.

Overall a very masterfully done graphic novel autobiography. Really I have never read anything like this before. I highly recommend it. I would recommend for older teen or adult only, there are some graphic sex scenes and discussion about sex. I bet this is one of those books they are recommending for GLBT classes in college...there is just so much in here to discuss and think about.

Ever since I read a snippet of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007 I've wanted to read the whole thing. And now, years later, I finally got around to it. I'm sorry I waited so long. The moments of deadpan hilarity are perfectly balanced with the moments of isolated desperation. I don't know if Alison Bechdel was that well-known before its publication, but she's certainly earned her celebrity status since then. In fact, as I write this, I've just learned that not only has the stage production of Fun Home opened on Broadway but it's also been nominated for 12 Tony awards.

I have a 2-rule maxim for comics: (1) Great writing can carry not-so-great artwork while great artwork cannot do the same—not even close—for lackluster writing. And (2) the quality and style of the artwork has to emotionally match the tone of the story. Fun Home hits these marks and more.

I know nothing of Bechdel's past other than what's portrayed here. I sense she was working through a few skeletons while writing Fun Home, like she was trying to make sense of what happened with the benefit of several decades of hindsight.

I stumbled upon someone talking about this book on YouTube and decided to give it a try. Wow! I never thought an autobiography could be so gripping. I read it all in one go. As a beginning English major I found the parallels to classic literature especially appealing. I also really enjoyed the illustrations, they made me feel even more immersed and even closer to the author. I thought the nonlinear timeline had surprising fluidity. You should read this book.

This memoir in graphic novel form about Alison Bechdel’s youth in a small Pennsylvania town, her transformational education in college, and her relationships with her parents is an engrossing, erudite, and profoundly thought-provoking book. There’s an important substratum of sexuality which runs throughout it but Bechdel’s point of view is wonderfully filtered through the many works of literature she’s read and appreciated, which gives it a very literary tone, not something I would have expected from a book in this form. The artwork is very effective in the service of her memories and her struggle to make sense of her family, showing, for example, the beautiful and intricately decorated home the restoration of which was a particular passion of her father. This is a very personal book and I am amazed at the maturity and the profundity of the thoughts and feelings Bechdel is able to extract from her life and put on the page.

I saw this musical at the Victory Gardens theater (the old Biograph movie theater.). It was the moving rendition of a girl’s coming of age story and her relationship with her father. She always has an unsatisfied desire to be closer to her father who she slowly realizes is a closeted homosexual. He ends up killing himself soon after she comes out as a lesbian while she is away at college.
My husband and I loved this play. The story was sweetly sad and funny at times. The songs were sometimes poignant, sometimes revelatory and sometimes pure elation.
The graphic novel is a memoir that tells this bittersweet story and illustrates it beautifully with humor and attention to detail in a variety of settings including mostly the Fun Home — a Gothic Revival house which doubles as a funeral home, a brief trip to NYC with her Dad and brothers and Alison’s experiences away at college.
I enjoyed this book very much and feel that it captured what I loved in the musical while broadening the details of the story. I think the graphic novel form was ideal for telling this story. Now I’m going to read another graphic novel by the same author about her relationship with her mother called, “Are You My Mother?”

“Fun Home” is a graphic novel that I greedily consumed in one sitting, but will be re-reading soon as I know there was a lot I missed. There is a ton packed into this book. There are references to classics and modern books I need to revisit, historical events, gender stereotypes, psychology, family dynamics, small town influences and so much more. If you only read the book, it would be impressive. The matching illustrations elevated the book to a work of art and a rich storytelling experience.

Through exploring the relationship with her father, Bechdel also integrates her uncomfortable coming of age story that was carefully documented in a series of journals. In many ways, Bechdel shares with us a truer story than most of us could share due to this unflinching documentation and dissertation of day-to-day events. I would highly recommend this to fans of unusual memoirs whether you have typically read graphic novels or not.

Who should read it? Fans of memoirs, discussion of LGBT psyche, coming of age or anyone who had a classic book that changed the course of their life.

Reading more at www.ReadingToDistraction.com or @Read2Distract

Alison Bechdel is clearly a very poignant and insightful writer, a maverick chronicler of the gay experience. Her relationship with her father is conveyed throughout Fun Home with exceptional poise and using the medium to her full advantage (shrinking panels for an important car-bound conversation late in the book for instance really works the tension). Each image is carefully rendered to provide an emotional punch and for the most part the narrative stings with mordant and merciless wit. There are a glut of literary allusions: Fitzgerald (with whom Alison's father is notably infatuated), Joyce (whose magnum opus Ulysses carries the book to its stunning circuitous conclusion), Wilde and Proust (for obvious and rather ham-fisted reasons), and a host of lesser-known queer writers like the indispensable Kate Millet. While this is certainly a story packed full of academics, most of them cruising between clandestine encounters (a house full of autistics, Bechdel playfully laments), begging for something more , there is an implication that the writer in question is maybe, possibly, a tiny tiny bit too in love with her own voice. As I read Fun Home (devoured it really in one long sitting, smiling, crying, etc), it began to become obvious that the narrative track was going to choke-slam every panel, allowing very little room for interpretation. I don't know if I've read a comic that was so light on stand-alone imagery. With the exception of a lonely three, every panel gets a description, most of them incredibly alliterative. To make matters worse, some of these panels are jammed full of language which is doubtlessly verbose, even a bit, dare I say, pedantic. Words like ledgermain and demiglace are fine, the latter used cleverly as a way to describe congealing NYC odors, but when, for instance, the locusts descend on suburbia, it is a stretch to refer to their mating as both "the ambient noise of their conjugal exertions" and "some collective libidinal impulse, unleashing it into the atmosphere." Elsewhere, referring to a drive home from camping as "a postlapasarian melancholy" seems a tad grandiose. Of course, this is a story about language, about linguists (the dictionary is drawn up more than a few times), and, as I've said, academia (Oberlin graduates should look out for a panel containing a certain library hallmark) as much as it is a story about death and gay life and father/daughter relations, so the inflated language can, to a degree, be excused, particularly when the narrative itself is so rich with identifiable themes, interesting characters, and pictorial emotion. Bechdel is without a doubt a masterful of her form and this kuntstlerroman is a perfect example of her genius. Compact but bristling with delicious prose and themes that wouldn't feel out of place in all of those books the author shamelessly name-drops.

It seems that a conservative action group and some parents are none too thrilled with the College of Charleston's choice of Fun Home as freshman reading. One conservative leader even went so far as to call the book pornographic. So how could I not read it?

Know what I found? I found a book that is a very well written story about a girl's coming of age, how she dealt with finding her own identity, how she managed to love her father despite a difficult relationship with him that was only made more difficult by the discovery that he had a secret life, and then how all of this wraps around her father's apparent suicide and the affect of that upon the entire family. Heavy, but pretty normal stuff for coming of age literature. The two things that set this work apart are that both the author / daughter and the father are gay, and that it is a graphic novel. Being a graphic novel means you get to actually see some of the situations that would just be verbally described in a regular literary work.

This is a good book. It handles real issues. It does it in a way that is both entertaining and thought provoking. This work is a microcosm of exactly what college is meant to be - an exposure to new material so that you can expand your field of knowledge, learn from that, and grow. And then hopefully, no matter what you take away from that experience, you can put that new wisdom and growth to use in your own life.

For 38 years I have been waiting for a lesbian offspring death syndrome response to my personal outrage tearing American society limb from limb. I thought all I got was alcohol joe camel split psychoslit election of trump world dimorphism in 2016, ten years after Fun Home was published in 2006. The pictures are all great Kandinsky core prints of John John Jack hack you had to be there Milton Satan Donald ICE yo momma cluelessness.

What a brilliant story. Bechdel really brings a lot of elements of coming to terms with a "taboo" sexuality that straight people just wouldn't otherwise understand or even be aware of. The graphics are charming and were very meticulously, almost obsessively, drafted to recreate as many actual items and people as possible. So the faces, the paintings, the toys, they're almost all based on photos and vivid memories. That's enough reason to buy the book right there.

If you're queer in some way, BUY. THIS. BOOK. You will laugh, you will cry, and you will come away knowing something more about yourself, even if you're straight.

I read this at a friend's request. My friend felt that it represented his own experiences well and to that end I did enjoy the book.
However, I find her writing style very annoying. It seems clear that she loves words and seeks to find interesting and efficient words. But all too often her word choice is needlessly obscure in a way that I do not feel aided the book at all.
As far as the larger story, I feel that the focus is definitely on her relationship with her father and how his own identity affected their family and her own identity as a lesbian. While it is certainly interesting, I felt the book skipped over a lot of her own story in a way that left this relationship feeling empty and made her coming out seem flat and somewhat out of place.
It is an interesting read, but not one I would recommend to someone like me who has no experience with her other work.

While "Are You My Mother?" is about the author's distant, aloof mother who nevertheless shared bookish interests with her daughter, this book is about her father, who lived in the closet his entire life.

Alison Bechdel, who draws the famous comic strip about lesbian characters, grew up as a child in a beautiful Victorian mansion that her father himself had lovingly renvoted and filled with prized antique furnishing, which his unfortunate children found very stifling. Being an obsessive perfectionist, the father had forced his family into an idealized 1950s image to cover up who he really was: an abusive, narrasstic thug who preyed on young boys. Yet the author continued to ache for his fatherly love and approval, especially when she found herself in the same closet, too.

If that isn't all, the author spent her unhappy childhood in a world where parents exposed young children to naked, half-dissected bodies in the family-operated morgue, violently mistreated the mother within a child's earshot at bedtime, and went ballistic when a kid very nearly broke one of his favorite objects (it should be HIM who gets to break it, of course), where kids were taken to rather sleazy gay hangouts and friend's house where pornographic paintings of the mother figure hung in plain view, and where the father's groomed young male victims served as nursemaids and helping hands with his dream projects.

And the final tragedy strikes when the father's life is cut short by an oncoming bakery truck, which the author suspects is a deliberate suicide.

The worst irony of all is that if the father was actually "allowed" to be who he truly was in a rigidly conversative 1950s-1960s society, there would be no Alison Bechdel to discover who she really is, of course.

Skilly drawn with delicate blue watercolor shading and peppered by visual symbols, notes indicating something specific with a cartoonish Dick Tracyesque arrow, and references to classic books, the author spins a very bittersweet (and sometimes, TMI) autobiography where she both comes of age and comes out, too.

Lately I've been reading a few graphic novels and comics, very simple and light. But Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is another level. Family drama. Death. Suicide. Homosexuality. This graphic novel tells the story about what is was to the author, Alison Bechdel, growing up in these circumstances.

It wasn't what I was expecting, I read the spanish edition and the cover is very bright. Maybe that's why I expected something light. But I get why it's considered a great graphic novel! It's very realistic...it must have been hard to write about her life. I read the first chapter and didn't really get me at first, but a few days later I started reading it again because I was curious and finish it in only a couple of hours.

Totally recommended to anyone who wants to read a realistic and deep graphic novel. I'd like to read more from this author.

I wasn't familiar with Alison Bechdel's work until Slate picked her new book, Are You My Mother?, for their audio book club. And since that one had a longer hold list at the library, I started with Fun Home. FH is a graphic memoir in which Bechdel describes her search for identity while also trying to find that of her father--a tightly-closeted homosexual who died in what might have been an accident a few months after Bechdel herself came out to her family.

This is a book about questions rather than answers, so it lacks a conventional narrative. Instead, Bechdel paints her father in layers, overlapping and confounding time frames in order to build up a defined portrait of an admittedly enigmatic man. As a narrative device, chapters will revolve around a specific author or literary character that her father related to, and she loops these narratives back into her own discoveries with more than a few pithy observations. One of my favorite came in the first chapter when she asked what Daedalus most regretted when his Icarus plummeted into the ocean--the loss of his son or the design flaw in his fabricated wings. Another moment that resonated was a phone call after she came out to her parents in which her mother told her that her father had been having affairs with men and boys for years. Bechdel is most upset that she's gone from being a main character in her own drama to a footnote in her parents'. The familiar naivete of heady youth, coupled with the (sometimes literal) nakedness of her portrayal give this work a sort of fragil honesty. Indeed, who hasn't gotten angry at the world while they were in college? Who hasn't found themselves loving a parent in spite of their insanity? Who hasn't felt sorry for their family? Who doesn't have regrets? Who hasn't reinterpreted James and the Giant Peach as pornography?...

But what's really on display here is Bechdel's masterful sense of storytelling, the attention to character-revealing details. I loved the contrast in two letters from her father, one jovial and littered with typos, the other despairing and corrected. I loved the simple tricks that come from years of being a cartoonist--the way a single image will be split across multiple panels to create a sense of conflict, or the way panels are changed only slightly in repetitions to affect pacing, to make the eye linger on an image.

My only complaint with Fun Home is that Bechdel seems to run out of tricks in the last few chapters. The patterns become recognizable and I wasn't sure if she really had more to say or might just be filling out pages. It got a little same-y, but it never lost its earnestness. A very worthwhile read.

This work was well-drawn, as is all of Bechdel's work. It was also incredibly boring, kind of aimless, self-absorbed catharsis. I also thought we'd get to know more about her father's life, thoughts, feelings...along with hers.

I love her other stuff, but this rambling tome just wasn't for me.

So far, this is the rawest and most unforgiving graphic novel memoir I have read. While it is no great shock to discover the inevitable description of male masturbation which seems to creep into an eyebrow-raising number of books by men, it is still jarring and unfamiliar to encounter female masturbation as depicted by a woman, particularly in a graphic novel. Not that the images that accompany the description are graphic or depictive of the event, but just the fact that they are there adds a depth and nuance that is unusual.

Alison Bechdel, author and blunt protagonist crosses a line in 'Fun Home'. Somehow. I couldn't tell you exactly how, but the further I read the more I could feel that she crosses the line that most graphic novelists have drawn between what is and is not discussed within their pages, and she disregards it completely. Parents friends who suggest a foursome? It is included. I hope for their sake they are oblivious to this books existence! For me, her flagrant and unabashed disregard for any sense of propriety in this book makes it all the more charming.

Whilst you are reading this book, and the diary entries from Alison's childhood pile up, you begin to get the sense that she NEEDED to write this book. It's pages seem to omit a sigh of relief. The literary references to difficult texts are nonchalantly thrown in as though everybody knows about them and has probably read them; how many of us have, truthfully, actually finished (or even started) Joyce's 'Ulysses'? Proust? I enjoyed the bits which used material I have read and know well such as Wilde and Wind in the Willows but other bits are actually fairly dull. It's definitely a 'getting it off your chest' book, unapologetically so. Alison doesn't care that many readers will not understand her references or her feelings towards her father. Only she really has to understand it and, by writing a book, she has found a way to express and release that and, perhaps, find some peace with it.

And, might I add, the cover is the most luxurious and gorgeous shade of green.

This is, to put it very simply, an amazing book. It's so filled with humanity and understanding and love and memories, it's almost impossible to review. You want to just hand it to people and say, "Here. Read this. Now." Ah, well. Bechdel grew up in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, just off I-80, in one of the folds of the Allegheny Front Range, surrounded by the homes of her father's extended family, none of whom ever seemed to leave the area. Her mother wasn't a local girl, though, and her parents were married in Europe, where they seemed to be making plans to stay. But then her grandfather died and her Dad had to come back and take over the family funeral home -- the "fun home." There wasn't that much business, usually, in such a backwater, so he also taught English at the high school. Alison grew up knowing her parents were different in many ways from most of the community. They were intellectuals, for one thing, and well educated. Her Dad was an aesthete, constantly rebuilding and redecorating their large, Victorian home, while her mother acted in the local theater and pursued a graduate degree. Alison found she fit that same sort of mold, reading most of the books in her father's large library and thinking hard about the world and the people around her. Moreover, her attitudes and tastes as a kid were pretty butch and she finally realized, in college, that she was gay (though she obviously suspected it before that). But when she came out to her parents, she discovered that her father also was homosexual -- or maybe bisexual, since he had a family. And shortly after that, he was dead, run over on the state highway by a Sunbeam bread truck. Or was it, as she strongly suspects, actually suicide, the result of his desperation? He had had, she discovered, numerous relationships with men -- including her teenage babysitter when she was little -- and had gotten in trouble several times as a result. In trying to deal with all this, Bechdel turns her considerable analytical powers to an investigation, a study, of her parents, and what brought them together, and their relationship to their kids and to each other. She might not ever find conclusive answers as she takes the reader through the events of her early life and describes the observations she made growing up, and the conclusions she drew from them, and the effects on her. But she's trying. And she largely succeeds. The thing is, this is not just a picture book with captions. If Bechdel were not also a talented artist, this book might well have been an award-winning, best-selling literary memoir instead an award-winning, best-selling "graphic novel" (though the library shelves it, rightfully, in the biography section). Her style, in both her writing and her drawing, is thoughtful and deeply nuanced and you will want to revisit the pages and consider what she says, and shows, again and again. And you'll be thinking about Alison and her family for some time to come.

Alison Bechdel's life story lives up to the saying, "You can't make this stuff up." Growing up lesbian in a small town had to be bad enough, but growing up the daughter of a closeted gay funeral home director who jumped in front of an oncoming truck...well, you can't make this stuff up. Even if you are not familiar with Bechdel's fabulous comic Dykes to Watch Out For, you'll be sucked into this graphic novel that tells the story of her family life and how she discovered her dad's secret life. Gay or not, anyone who has been a teenager will relate to her memories of dealing with adolescence, sex and self-image. Bechdel incorporates snippets from her childhood diaries and her dad's letters and photos into the comic strip. I would have liked to know more about her mom, but that is not the focus of this book since (at the time she writes about) she did not know her mom's side of the story either. I read this book in one sitting and could not put it down....it was like being inside someone's head (someone very smart and funny).

As Art Spiegelman proved with Maus, father memoirs can take graphic narrative form. Courageously original and lovingly honest, Fun Home is a coming of age story--a story of lesbian self-discovery--which also outs the father posthumously as a closeted gay man and a possible suicide. In intertwining her father's story with her own, Bechdel is conscious of being as ruthless as her father was in "his monomaniacal restoration of our old house." She, too, is a Daedalus, who answers "not to the laws of society, but to those of [her] craft." Profoundly personal, Fun Home is also mythic. From the opening page onward, it is a rich affirmation of Stephen Daedalus's closing words in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead." This affirmation is triumphantly validated by "the tricky reverse narration" of Fun Home's final panels, in which Bechdel's artistically resurrected, epic father is there to catch and save her child self.

I was assigned to read this book for my college writing course that was all based on comic books. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and never lost interest all the way through. I was able to write 20 pages for my final paper on why Alison believes so strongly that her fathers death was a suicide and not an accident. I'm not sure why anyone would oppose to read this for their college course as it is a great read and extremely interesting. I'm currently reading Bechdel's follow-up novel which is written about her mother.

It's hard to know what to say about this book.

There's something about it that combines accessibility with a lot of raw power in a way that seems to be very unusual to me. I don't know if that's because of the graphic format, or if it's because Bechdel is just someone who can pull if off. But it packs the kind of punch that usually comes from much denser books. On that technical level, it seems somewhat wonderful, even if that's an odd word to attach to this story.

In any event, for me it was quick and easy to read, and almost overwhelmingly sad. The last page is kind of beautiful and kind of awful.

It's a very smart book, most obviously so in its literary references, but more significantly in its analysis of the events it describes. And I think it's a kind book. Not in a syrupy way, or in a superficial hollywood ending way. It's kind in the sense that Bechdel seems to have really dealt with her father as he was, and she loves him. Proust's narrator taught his mother not to value kindness above all other things in literature, but I'm not as bright as he was, and kindness matters more to me than it probably should. The last panel on the last page is important.

I can offer to criticisms, one trivial, the other less so. The trivial one is that this book perpetrates the myth that Proust is too hard for normal people to read. It's not true, everyone can and should read Proust. He's a lot easier than Joyce. So don't let anyone tell you that you're too dumb to read Proust. You're not.

The more substantive criticism is a reaction of a friend, who said that he felt that Bechdel's father's privacy has been invaded unfairly. That didn't occur to me as I was reading the book, but now that he's mentioned it it's hard to dismiss out of hand.

I told my friend that I thought Bechdel had the right to tell her own story, and that this is her story, even if its his as well. And I believe that. But this is pretty raw stuff, and I can see how some people would be uncomfortable.

It's pretty great. Not terribly similar to the comic strip -- it's a lot deeper, and a lot scarier. But it's pretty great.

I suppose it's difficult enough to reveal one's life on the page, but it must be quite another to then augment the dissertation with personal graphic illustrations that might carry the danger of simultaneously adding dimension while subtracting imagination from the reader's experience. But Alison Bechdel has achieved a triumphant balance with startling fecundity in FUN HOME, her autobiography that's both an explanation of her coming of age and of her father's coming out, sort of. The "fun" is in the observations of life with father as we romp through her pre-pubescent diary and consider the axioms she posits regarding the nature of her burgeoning sexuality.

Ms. Bechdel flits from one year, back to another, forward to another, yet offers the reader a soft landing each time. Within one chapter we find Alison as a young, cut-off wearing child eager to gain favor from her distant father by vacuuming the Fun Home and without warning, boom, she's in her college library, thumbing through lesbian literature. The flippant chronology somehow works to the advantage of the unfolding story, and she displays fabulous, tight literary prose, although I could do without rushing to the dictionary every fourth page to learn the meaning of "welter" or "tautology." She didn't propose that one medium explain the other: the graphics, composed with a brilliant eye for the emotional range of the characters in her life, primarily her father and herself, feed on the written narrative and our imagination, a task made tougher by the intimate subject matter that translated to the comic while stepping along the borders of pathos. It's like Rembrandt adding masturbatory commentary to his muddy self-portraits. The result is a magnificent, if fractured fairy tale.

The only rub was the liberal use of literary analogy to explain her innermost discoveries as she grapples with her father's nature and demise. Even she battled her English professors' propensities for drawing far reaching parallels from simple narratives, which tickled me. She's a smart cookie, and Fun Home is a brave, new work, but I might have thought that her observations of a father who spent the bulk of his free time flowering his garden, reading Fitzgerald and Joyce, decorating his library and ignoring her mother, all while she made a hobby of studying other men in her life might have led her to an inescapable conclusion, but then rationalization is a powerful process. Look at Zelda, for Chrissakes.

When your father is an exacting home renovator, meticulous interior decorator, local mortician, high shcool English teacher, and closeted homosexual, who you suspect likely had sexual relations with adolescent boys - if you're like most autobiopic authors these days, then you'd probably write your own private hyperbolic "Running With Scissors," throwing everything up against the wall, and crudely splattering your immediate family's history across the pages of your tunnel-visioned, self-promoting, and sensational memoir. But Alison Bechdel is neither an ordinary author nor a poorly educated one. She has both an independently crafted intellect and a capable library of classic literary sources and themes. She does not choose to focus on minutia or overly far-reaching causalities. Her first autobiography is a corncopia of expertly-coordinated art forms, carved into a concise, gravitational, and enlightening narrative.

I highly recommend not only buying and reading this book, but I also encourage studying Bechdel's perspectives, reasoning connections, and causal theories.

This book is a modern heroic quest to find meanings, understandings, and truths in intimate behaviors, wants, and relationships.

Many authors focus on picturesquely and emotionally describing the abnormalities of their past. Bechdel is fully capable of parroting those common abilities. But her aims are further reaching and more well-intended than simply trying for accurate multi-sensory recollection. She goes happily beyond and effectively reveals the origins of some of her creative forces. She sympathetically and honestly portrays the cultural, familial, and private paradoxes that likely disabled so many of her (and our) loved ones who are not ordinary in their desires.

Anyone who incorrectly thinks women can't be visually-centric need only read this book. Bechdel's visual memory is both astounding and rewarding for the rest of us. And her other areas of memory, from smells to feelings to current events to literary quotes in her educational development are indicative of an artist who tries to consider, evaluate, and remember more than most people do. She does not filter her memories through rose colored glasses, but she does effectively step outside status quo lenses to make her own evaluations and portrayals.

Reading some of the recent popular homosexual memoirs, a person might think homosexuals are NOT predominantly driven by love or desire, but rather driven by poor experiences, revenge, whistleblowing, or hatred. Where most authors blame their family and past relationships for their own problems, Bechdel does not. She sees more perspectives and she is better educated than most. Bechdel chooses to not simply blame others for her past OCD, inabilities, and abnormalities, even while she illustrates capably the environment in which those conditions arose.

The title "Fun Home" probably has many intended meanings, like Jeannette Wells memoir entitled "The Glass Castle" has many transparent meanings. Both memoirs speak of fun times, but I think Bechdel sees even more of the good intentions in her father's "mad" pursuits than Wells perceived. Both fathers showed flashes of brilliance mixed with Achilles Heels so notorious, it's a wonder they could walk at all sometimes. And in Wells' defense, at least Bechdel's father was better read and less often intoxicated.

The title "Fun Home" is not singularly intended with negative or sarcastic connotations. Alison Bechdel shows us how she had fun growing up, as much fun as a person could have dealing with the ever present spoken and unspoken, addressed and unaddressed familial conflicts constantly battling in her home.

I think it would be insufficent to call this a young woman's "coming of age" book. It may be more accurate to say this book is about a family coming of age. And I think the publication of this beautiful story is an assertive exercise in encouraging societal sensibilities to come of age.

Bechdel does not seek to excuse all of her father's behaviors, but rather to help others understand them. She wants more people to understand what can happen to very intelligent and talented people when they are incorrectly trained to believe that some of their primary drives and loves are sinful, shameful, or should be killed or hidden. She writes:

"I suppose a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cummulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death. Ulysses, of course, was banned for many years by people who found its honesty obscene."

I felt pretty good that I was able to not cry while reading the book. But after I read the last page, the tears just flowed.

The novel has beautiful, poignant moments (for example: the end panel of chapter 2 was a punch to the guts as was the very last panel), the art is lovely and there are intriguing elements to the story. However overall, the persistent analogies with highbrow literature, the complex vocabulary and the non-linear telling of the story made it difficult to enjoy. The literary references in particular kept knocking me out of the mental picture that’s normally painted with really compelling storytelling. It was more towards the second half of the book that I started to fatigue with the disjointedness of the story and the constant reference to literature (it all came across as a bit affected). I’m not discounting this novel – it was lovely and intriguing book, just not as powerful as some other autobiographies (eg Marjane Satrapi, “The Complete Persepolis.”)

This memoir could have been called "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" but that title is taken. Nevertheless, that is the most apt description for Fun Home that I can think of. Alison Bechdel's spare prose and simple, black-and-white line drawings convey an emotional complexity that will push buttons for many, if not all, readers because in one way or another most of us suffered childhoods that tested our abilities to make sense of the senseless.

My own childhood was nothing like Bechdel's, yet at the same time it was exactly like hers. All of the details are different, while all of the feelings are the same. I would say that at the heart of Fun Home lies Bechdel's need to justify to herself the love she felt (and continues to feel) for a father who was too wrapped up in his own identity conflicts to even acknowledge, much less help address, his child's. And who was too weak even to live out his full two score and seven, taking his life sometime in his 40s when Bechdel was just out of college.

Bechdel's contempt for her father is apparent, as is her love. She is at once angry and admiring, cynical about his motives and proud of his accomplishments. Her ambivalence is nearly overwhelming, and something that I suspect many of us share in relation to our parents. In the end, I believe, the lucky ones among us come to some inner accommodation wherein we are able to forgive our parents for their lapses, even those that are quite literally sinful, and honor the things they were able to do that live on in our hearts and minds after they are gone.

Fun Home is a beautiful book whose drawings aid the reader's imagination in fleshing out details of an early life that was deeply felt and well lived. I highly recommend it.

My general complaint with comics and graphic novels is that great art or simply the fact that it is a visual medium hides the often weak writing associated with it. The comic boom of the 1990's and its sudden decline is a perfect example of the mass-produced and clone-like quality that comics took and the backlash of fans and readers. Luckily, the past few years has seen a growing movement of people to comic book stores and of people buying up graphic novels to the point where they now occupy sections in major bookstores. Bechdel's "Fun Home" is a perfect example as to why comics are cool to read (and why people like me don't have to hide our love of them). Using diary entries from her childhood, Bechdel really exposes her formative years and how difficult they were in a family life that was less than ideal. Her father continously cheated on her mother with boys with young boys he would pick up any which way, they lived in a house that was a throwback to another era, and the normal intimacies associated with family such as touch and other expressions of intimacy were absent. Bechdel explores her relationship with her father and the gender-flip that takes place as she ages and comes to the realization she is a lesbian. The narrative moves back and forth and with each pass, readers are given more details into the daughter-father relationship. The tragicomic appelatiion is appropriate as questions surrounding her father's death add an even sadder feel to the story. Bechdel's artwork fits extremely well with the story and her pacing is reminiscent of some of my other favorite writer/artists such as Alex Robinson and Derek Kirk Kim. What really stands out for me is her literary achievements within the text and the way she draws on so much "stuff" out of legends and fiction. I read this in one sitting and plan to do so again in the next day or so. Great work that should not be missed.

Graphic novel/memoir of Bechdel’s … eventful early life. Her father was a deeply closeted homosexual, who took his frustration and self-hatred out on his house—he was obsessed with redecorating their massive Victorian home. They also have a funeral home—started by Bechdel’s great-grandfather—which is where the book’s title originates. Bechdel draws Dykes to Watch Out For, and as personal as that strip is, this is her first effort at memoir. A coming out story set against her dysfunctional family life, this is a top-rated story of how one parent’s demons can affect an entire house.

Fun Home is a memoir told in the form of a graphic novel. When Alison Bechdel was twenty, her father died, four months after Alison came out as a lesbian and shortly thereafter found out that her father had affairs with men.

“I’d been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents’ tragedy.”

Fun Home is Bechdel’s reflections on her childhood and her relationship with her father. Obviously, it involves a large coming of age element, which isn’t one of my favorite story types. However, I did enjoy Fun Home.

It’s unclear how much truth there is to any of the connections Bechdel draws, which she will readily admit in the memoir itself. She and her mother speculate that her father’s death was a suicide, but they have no firm evidence. She also admit that his death might not be related to her coming out, as there were plenty of other reasons that might have motivated his suicide, including her mother asking him for a divorce two weeks before. Yet Fun Home is less about Alison Bechdel finding the concrete truth as it is a documentary of her own experiences and thoughts. Its nature is highly personal.

There were elements to Fun Home that I was not so fond of. The constant literary references might have been important to Bechdel’s life, but they could feel pretentious at times. I also didn’t think the art was anything note worthy. It wasn’t bad, but it never moved past “all right.”

Still, on the whole, Fun Home is a book worth reading.

"Graphic novels" come with a certain amount of baggage--there seems to be a subset of the population who read (or collect and preserve in climate-controlled vaults...) comics and graphic novels, and too often accept style over novel-like content. Not so this one! Bechdel has produced an emotionally intense and unflinchingly honest memoir here, and the artwork perfectly complements rather than overwhelms the narrative.

I hate to see Bechdel ghettoized as a Lesbian artist/writer, because while the Dykes to Watch Out for strips were (obviously) gay-themed, they were scorchingly funny and the characters complex enough to appeal to a less-invested audience than just the gay community. While Fun Home does address Bechdel's father's closeted homo- or bisexuality, and her own coming out to her parents, the book really isn't exclusively a "gay" memoir. It's a memoir of a complex set of family relationships and memories of her own young life seen through her adult eyes. And in that regard, it has universal appeal.

At an author's reading, Bechdel went into some detail regarding her illustrations. She had access to a great many photos of the inside of the family home, and went to great pains to render detail accurately (although these are not static copies, but lively, expressive drawings).

Fun Home has at once both a tear-inducing emotional rawness and a comic, belly-laugh inducing, almost gleeful sense of the absurdity of everyday family life. Savor every frame--it took the author over seven years to produce, and given the state of the graphic novel (in the US) I fear it will be a while before we see another quite as good.

I've read graphic novels for, oh, about forever now. I especially love the works of Neil Gaiman and Terry Moore. Things that really make you think, and yet also grab your viscera and tug hard.

This consuming work is all about family. The kind we all really have, but rarely examine too closely. Bechdel dissects the artifice necessary in order to maintain the facade of the traditional nuclear family using her relationship with her father.

Truthfully, when we are "mother" or "father" or even "daughter," we are all slipping somewhat into the realm of fantasy. Our authentic selves are rarely able to be confined within the expectations society has of each of those iconic roles.

I am struggling not to become "mother" to the exclusion of all else I can be. I could empathize with Bechdel's mother's situation. So much given up. Yes, I love my children. But after reading Bechdel's account of how her mother's anger at her loss of self played out for her daughter, I wonder how much my children already understand of my resentment that marriage and motherhood demand so much of women.

And yet the author conveys her understanding and compassion toward her parents. She can see how each was shaped or warped by unrealistic and anti-human societal expectations, as she fights so vigorously against being constrained by the same.

A beautiful and haunting book. Highly recommended.

I didn't even know what a graphic novel was until recently, and only read this at the urging of a good friend and avid reader who is very selective in the books she recommends. I had this idea that graphic novels would be comics for adults and in some way "dumb down" reading.
Not so with Fun Home. The combination of great writing and well-done illustrations just increases the story-telling effect. Bechdel is able to show important things in the drawings that might have been hard to describe in the writing...especially at times when the writing is from a younger child's viewpoint. The illustrations show a lot of what is going on...that a child wouldn't recognize.
Bechdel is laugh-out-loud funny at times, makes up interesting words that truly should be added to the dictionary, and tells a compelling story. I'm recommending this book to all my family and friends. If all graphic novels are this good, I'm sold on the genre. (but I expect it will be like any books...takes great writing to make them work.)
and I agree that it's probably best NOT to know the story line ahead of time...makes for much more interesting and sudden twists.
Kathie Hightower, coauthor of Help! I'm a Military Spouse -- I Get a Life Too! 2d Edition

This graphic memoir is emotionally powerful while remaining enjoyable. Bechdel tackles subjects such as homosexuality, fidelity and death using text and images that are seriously tender, painstakingly rendered and suggestive. Exploring her past as a graphic novel makes her story feel very personal. Drawing the reader in through colorless imagery, her text then elaborates on the sadness and struggle illustrated on the faces of her characters.

She recounts growing up in rural Pennsylvania, focusing her memories on her relationship with her father. Discovering her own sexuality as she matures, Bechdel reflects on her childhood now knowing her father was gay. She is honest and insightful, sharing private details that occasionally make the read wince with sympathy and discomfort.

Fun Home is a great place to start if you're new to the "graphic novel" scene, or you're just a casual reader. To start, Bechdel is a genius. No actually, she's a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur genius grant, and rightly so. Her story ("Fun Home" is auto-biographical), is deeply moving, especially for: members of the queer community, anyone who loves literature, and/or anyone who has a parent, regardless of their relationship with said parent. However, the way the author crafts her story is what really pulls you into the sordid lives of the Bechdel clan. Exquisite details from an exhausting illumination process provide for an an experience you have to read for yourself to understand.

A woman reflects back on her upbringing with her mother who studies theater and her father, an English teacher / funeral home director / interior designer in this graphic memoir. There is a lot of sexual tension and angst and outright sexually explicit panels. It also deals with homosexuality, so if you're not okay with that sort of thing, don't bother reading this. I liked it, though some scenes made me uncomfortable.

The quiet and sometimes disturbing story of Alison Bechdel's childhood and young adulthood is shared here in graphic novel format. And it is a triumph.

Everything about this was just fantastic for me. It wasn't really a story; not in the usual sense of having a plot, or a beginning/middle/end. But it was an amalgam of preserved memories and scattered artifacts gathered according to a theme and viewed through a certain shadowy but precious lens. Bechdel does an excellent job isolating elements of her childhood and bringing them into context with later experiences, and framing them in such a way that they become at once funny, awful, depressing, inspiring, and weirdly familiar.

Most people have a family, and most people know that within that family, a certain "us" culture develops. This graphic novel is frequently about her "us" culture, including a father who was secretly queer and liked having illicit relationships with young men but was so much more than just that unflattering description. She was offered very little opportunity to have a father/daughter intimacy with him, and they disagreed on some important things, but it's so interesting how she writes with a strange detachment about how much and in how many ways she wanted to be close to him (and how the memories of isolated instances where she got to were so bright in her mind). I loved the bit where she kissed him on the hand because she didn't quite know how to express love for her father, and how she loved playing airplane with him as a child because there were so few opportunities to touch him and she wasn't sure how to create those opportunities. She was a worried child--one who went through a longish bout with severe OCD--and she grew up in a very strange atmosphere associated with a funeral home ("fun home"), ultimately growing up with some painful distance between herself and her emotions and dropping a lot of the narrative focus on her father's death (which was possibly a suicide).

I think the depiction of Alison's childhood journal was my favorite part. As she developed OCD tendencies, she began to worry about whether she was an unreliable narrator of her own life, and began to put qualifications on everything she wrote down. These eventually developed into codes in which she rarely wrote anything without covering them with the code for doubting that they were true just in case, and she spent much of her time and energy on avoiding some amorphous badness that could collect in doorways or attack her if she put her clothes on in the wrong order. I loved the various presentations of her "incantations" to ward off evil that she brought on herself by doing things wrong according to her self-appointed rules, and how she developed a creative solution for moving past her compulsions. I've noticed that when authors write about mental illnesses and anxiety, they usually tend to present OCD in very stale ways with extremely typical compulsions, and Alison's struck me as so relatable and realistic that I felt like I understood how these illogical "rules" developed. You really got a sense of what it is like to think the way she did. I never had obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I was similar to her in some ways, and I too developed my own codes and shorthand for things I didn't feel comfortable setting down in ink. (I'd journal about something I knew was related to the thing I was really journaling about, and then I'd know from context what happened, but no one else would. And I developed a literal code language that I'd sometimes write in if I wanted to be frank but never worry that someone would read it.)

Another thing I ADORED were the small details that made me feel like I was rooting through a box of her unsorted scrapbook items. Especially when she reproduced the phone message that told her to call home when her dad got hit by a truck. The person who took the message misspelled her name as "Allison." It's realism like that that makes it so accessible and personal. Same with that lovely little game her family played where the children would point a flashlight at the ceiling looking for ants, while their grandmother would categorize them. Things like this capture the is-ness of family so completely. And her father was hit by a Sunbeam bread truck. I saw Sunbeam bread on a table in a later panel that depicted an earlier happening, and many of the small items in the graphic novel had brand names on them.

And there were SO many beautiful moments that were also really, really tragic. It was so poignant when she wondered whether coming out to her parents had in any way caused her dad to jump in front of a truck, and suggested that maybe she sort of hopes that it WAS connected because it's one of the only connections she had to the man. Same with the ghastly grins she and her brother exchanged when they saw each other for the first time after their dad's death. There was so much there in that exchange of an inappropriate smile. When you think about it, reactions to death kind of can't be inappropriate, because it's such an absurd thing to happen--a person is deleted. They grinned. Same with how she sometimes laughed when she told people about it, to the point that they thought she was making it up. (I loved that she cried earnestly with her girlfriend shortly after it happened, though, and that that was kind of it--she couldn't access more emotion after that, though this book shows many, many nuanced emotions surrounding her feelings about him.) The way Alison enjoyed relaying the tragic happenings through deadpan to vicariously absorb others' shock and grief was very, very interesting.

And her home environment--she lived in a strange house that her dad was always decorating and restoring, and she felt that he cared more about those things and put more of himself into them than he did into his family. That she and her brothers and mother were sort of like furnishings to him, to complete a picture, because that's what lives in a home--a family, consisting of a man and wife with their kids. I love that she referred to him as "indifferent to the human cost of his projects," and that she wondered if the mythic Daedalus was sad about Icarus's wings failing not because he crashed into the sea and drowned, but because they represented a design failure. (The mythic invocations throughout were fabulous, and usually not particularly obscure.)

It's so funny that she initially didn't understand the humor in The Addams Family cartoon book she had because her own life had such a similar spooky aesthetic (mom looked like Morticia, she herself looked like Wednesday, house was sort of gothic and occasionally invaded by bats, they literally had a funeral home for a family business which involved playing around corpses and considering cemeteries to be playgrounds). This was the norm, and this was family. It was also GREAT how she said her father's showy library would normally come across as pretentious to people but it wasn't a pretense because that's how he really was. She later talked about Gatsby having a library full of unread books and how they represented a fictional life, while her father's library full of creased, obviously read books also represented a fictional life. Dang, that's moving. And haunting. As was the story about her mom using a tape recorder to practice her acting lines and realizing she had been taping over her dead husband's voice--on a tape they'd both been using for their individual arts and work. I loved that juxtaposition.

Overall I just adored coming into this world and being moved, disturbed, delighted, and shocked by this raw and honest depiction of a life and family. Most of it was nothing like my own life, but the fact that I felt like I recognized so much of it is a testament to how accessible and authentic it felt throughout. Blown away!

While I've been aware of and have sporadically read Alison Bechdel's DYKES... work over the years, I came to FUN HOME as a fan of graphic novels in general, with Art Speigelman's MAUS books being my own gold standard. I suspect it's merely a coincidence that both are father-child memoirs, but after reading FUN HOME, I could also make the case for it being no coincidence at all. FUN HOME tells a deep and touching story in a magnificent way. Bechdel gives you up front what appear to be basic facts about her history, but then she circles back over those facts as the story unfolds; you read the facts a second or third time with a slightly different context and those facts take on a richer meaning, or they illuminate the story in a new light; sometimes, they make you flip back to the first time she told them, so you can compare and ponder. You gradually find yourself deep in the weeds with these facts, and I mean that in a good way. You think about the pieces and parts of her father's story, and you wonder which angle is the truest one. Did he, or didn't he? I'm not sure I'm sure.

Bechdel parallels the mysteries of her father's story with her personal history of coming out; this, too, is wonderfully revealed in all its confusions and complexities.

Last, but not at all least, consider the illustrations, which are divine. Not only do they draw you into them on their face value as graceful depictions of the story she's telling, but they are full of interesting visual clues to the plots as they unfold. I can't wait to go back and reread this book, looking carefully for the references to the coming actions or occurrences. The illustrations also contain lots of cultural touchstones, product logos and the like, which give them yet another element of fun.

This book is elegant, both humorous and poignant, and quite a revelation.

The novel has beautiful, poignant moments (for example: the end panel of chapter 2 was a punch to the guts as was the very last panel), the art is lovely and there are intriguing elements to the story. However overall, the persistent analogies with highbrow literature, the complex vocabulary and the non-linear telling of the story made it difficult to enjoy. The literary references in particular kept knocking me out of the mental picture that’s normally painted with really compelling storytelling. It was more towards the second half of the book that I started to fatigue with the disjointedness of the story and the constant reference to literature (it all came across as a bit affected). I’m not discounting this novel – it was lovely and intriguing book, just not as powerful as some other autobiographies (eg Marjane Satrapi, “The Complete Persepolis.”)

This memoir could have been called "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" but that title is taken. Nevertheless, that is the most apt description for Fun Home that I can think of. Alison Bechdel's spare prose and simple, black-and-white line drawings convey an emotional complexity that will push buttons for many, if not all, readers because in one way or another most of us suffered childhoods that tested our abilities to make sense of the senseless.

My own childhood was nothing like Bechdel's, yet at the same time it was exactly like hers. All of the details are different, while all of the feelings are the same. I would say that at the heart of Fun Home lies Bechdel's need to justify to herself the love she felt (and continues to feel) for a father who was too wrapped up in his own identity conflicts to even acknowledge, much less help address, his child's. And who was too weak even to live out his full two score and seven, taking his life sometime in his 40s when Bechdel was just out of college.

Bechdel's contempt for her father is apparent, as is her love. She is at once angry and admiring, cynical about his motives and proud of his accomplishments. Her ambivalence is nearly overwhelming, and something that I suspect many of us share in relation to our parents. In the end, I believe, the lucky ones among us come to some inner accommodation wherein we are able to forgive our parents for their lapses, even those that are quite literally sinful, and honor the things they were able to do that live on in our hearts and minds after they are gone.

Fun Home is a beautiful book whose drawings aid the reader's imagination in fleshing out details of an early life that was deeply felt and well lived. I highly recommend it.

My general complaint with comics and graphic novels is that great art or simply the fact that it is a visual medium hides the often weak writing associated with it. The comic boom of the 1990's and its sudden decline is a perfect example of the mass-produced and clone-like quality that comics took and the backlash of fans and readers. Luckily, the past few years has seen a growing movement of people to comic book stores and of people buying up graphic novels to the point where they now occupy sections in major bookstores. Bechdel's "Fun Home" is a perfect example as to why comics are cool to read (and why people like me don't have to hide our love of them). Using diary entries from her childhood, Bechdel really exposes her formative years and how difficult they were in a family life that was less than ideal. Her father continously cheated on her mother with boys with young boys he would pick up any which way, they lived in a house that was a throwback to another era, and the normal intimacies associated with family such as touch and other expressions of intimacy were absent. Bechdel explores her relationship with her father and the gender-flip that takes place as she ages and comes to the realization she is a lesbian. The narrative moves back and forth and with each pass, readers are given more details into the daughter-father relationship. The tragicomic appelatiion is appropriate as questions surrounding her father's death add an even sadder feel to the story. Bechdel's artwork fits extremely well with the story and her pacing is reminiscent of some of my other favorite writer/artists such as Alex Robinson and Derek Kirk Kim. What really stands out for me is her literary achievements within the text and the way she draws on so much "stuff" out of legends and fiction. I read this in one sitting and plan to do so again in the next day or so. Great work that should not be missed.

Graphic novel/memoir of Bechdel’s … eventful early life. Her father was a deeply closeted homosexual, who took his frustration and self-hatred out on his house—he was obsessed with redecorating their massive Victorian home. They also have a funeral home—started by Bechdel’s great-grandfather—which is where the book’s title originates. Bechdel draws Dykes to Watch Out For, and as personal as that strip is, this is her first effort at memoir. A coming out story set against her dysfunctional family life, this is a top-rated story of how one parent’s demons can affect an entire house.

Fun Home is a memoir told in the form of a graphic novel. When Alison Bechdel was twenty, her father died, four months after Alison came out as a lesbian and shortly thereafter found out that her father had affairs with men.

“I’d been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents’ tragedy.”

Fun Home is Bechdel’s reflections on her childhood and her relationship with her father. Obviously, it involves a large coming of age element, which isn’t one of my favorite story types. However, I did enjoy Fun Home.

It’s unclear how much truth there is to any of the connections Bechdel draws, which she will readily admit in the memoir itself. She and her mother speculate that her father’s death was a suicide, but they have no firm evidence. She also admit that his death might not be related to her coming out, as there were plenty of other reasons that might have motivated his suicide, including her mother asking him for a divorce two weeks before. Yet Fun Home is less about Alison Bechdel finding the concrete truth as it is a documentary of her own experiences and thoughts. Its nature is highly personal.

There were elements to Fun Home that I was not so fond of. The constant literary references might have been important to Bechdel’s life, but they could feel pretentious at times. I also didn’t think the art was anything note worthy. It wasn’t bad, but it never moved past “all right.”

Still, on the whole, Fun Home is a book worth reading.

"Graphic novels" come with a certain amount of baggage--there seems to be a subset of the population who read (or collect and preserve in climate-controlled vaults...) comics and graphic novels, and too often accept style over novel-like content. Not so this one! Bechdel has produced an emotionally intense and unflinchingly honest memoir here, and the artwork perfectly complements rather than overwhelms the narrative.

I hate to see Bechdel ghettoized as a Lesbian artist/writer, because while the Dykes to Watch Out for strips were (obviously) gay-themed, they were scorchingly funny and the characters complex enough to appeal to a less-invested audience than just the gay community. While Fun Home does address Bechdel's father's closeted homo- or bisexuality, and her own coming out to her parents, the book really isn't exclusively a "gay" memoir. It's a memoir of a complex set of family relationships and memories of her own young life seen through her adult eyes. And in that regard, it has universal appeal.

At an author's reading, Bechdel went into some detail regarding her illustrations. She had access to a great many photos of the inside of the family home, and went to great pains to render detail accurately (although these are not static copies, but lively, expressive drawings).

Fun Home has at once both a tear-inducing emotional rawness and a comic, belly-laugh inducing, almost gleeful sense of the absurdity of everyday family life. Savor every frame--it took the author over seven years to produce, and given the state of the graphic novel (in the US) I fear it will be a while before we see another quite as good.

I've read graphic novels for, oh, about forever now. I especially love the works of Neil Gaiman and Terry Moore. Things that really make you think, and yet also grab your viscera and tug hard.

This consuming work is all about family. The kind we all really have, but rarely examine too closely. Bechdel dissects the artifice necessary in order to maintain the facade of the traditional nuclear family using her relationship with her father.

Truthfully, when we are "mother" or "father" or even "daughter," we are all slipping somewhat into the realm of fantasy. Our authentic selves are rarely able to be confined within the expectations society has of each of those iconic roles.

I am struggling not to become "mother" to the exclusion of all else I can be. I could empathize with Bechdel's mother's situation. So much given up. Yes, I love my children. But after reading Bechdel's account of how her mother's anger at her loss of self played out for her daughter, I wonder how much my children already understand of my resentment that marriage and motherhood demand so much of women.

And yet the author conveys her understanding and compassion toward her parents. She can see how each was shaped or warped by unrealistic and anti-human societal expectations, as she fights so vigorously against being constrained by the same.

A beautiful and haunting book. Highly recommended.

I didn't even know what a graphic novel was until recently, and only read this at the urging of a good friend and avid reader who is very selective in the books she recommends. I had this idea that graphic novels would be comics for adults and in some way "dumb down" reading.
Not so with Fun Home. The combination of great writing and well-done illustrations just increases the story-telling effect. Bechdel is able to show important things in the drawings that might have been hard to describe in the writing...especially at times when the writing is from a younger child's viewpoint. The illustrations show a lot of what is going on...that a child wouldn't recognize.
Bechdel is laugh-out-loud funny at times, makes up interesting words that truly should be added to the dictionary, and tells a compelling story. I'm recommending this book to all my family and friends. If all graphic novels are this good, I'm sold on the genre. (but I expect it will be like any books...takes great writing to make them work.)
and I agree that it's probably best NOT to know the story line ahead of time...makes for much more interesting and sudden twists.
Kathie Hightower, coauthor of Help! I'm a Military Spouse -- I Get a Life Too! 2d Edition

This graphic memoir is emotionally powerful while remaining enjoyable. Bechdel tackles subjects such as homosexuality, fidelity and death using text and images that are seriously tender, painstakingly rendered and suggestive. Exploring her past as a graphic novel makes her story feel very personal. Drawing the reader in through colorless imagery, her text then elaborates on the sadness and struggle illustrated on the faces of her characters.

She recounts growing up in rural Pennsylvania, focusing her memories on her relationship with her father. Discovering her own sexuality as she matures, Bechdel reflects on her childhood now knowing her father was gay. She is honest and insightful, sharing private details that occasionally make the read wince with sympathy and discomfort.

Fun Home is a great place to start if you're new to the "graphic novel" scene, or you're just a casual reader. To start, Bechdel is a genius. No actually, she's a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur genius grant, and rightly so. Her story ("Fun Home" is auto-biographical), is deeply moving, especially for: members of the queer community, anyone who loves literature, and/or anyone who has a parent, regardless of their relationship with said parent. However, the way the author crafts her story is what really pulls you into the sordid lives of the Bechdel clan. Exquisite details from an exhausting illumination process provide for an an experience you have to read for yourself to understand.

A woman reflects back on her upbringing with her mother who studies theater and her father, an English teacher / funeral home director / interior designer in this graphic memoir. There is a lot of sexual tension and angst and outright sexually explicit panels. It also deals with homosexuality, so if you're not okay with that sort of thing, don't bother reading this. I liked it, though some scenes made me uncomfortable.

The quiet and sometimes disturbing story of Alison Bechdel's childhood and young adulthood is shared here in graphic novel format. And it is a triumph.

Everything about this was just fantastic for me. It wasn't really a story; not in the usual sense of having a plot, or a beginning/middle/end. But it was an amalgam of preserved memories and scattered artifacts gathered according to a theme and viewed through a certain shadowy but precious lens. Bechdel does an excellent job isolating elements of her childhood and bringing them into context with later experiences, and framing them in such a way that they become at once funny, awful, depressing, inspiring, and weirdly familiar.

Most people have a family, and most people know that within that family, a certain "us" culture develops. This graphic novel is frequently about her "us" culture, including a father who was secretly queer and liked having illicit relationships with young men but was so much more than just that unflattering description. She was offered very little opportunity to have a father/daughter intimacy with him, and they disagreed on some important things, but it's so interesting how she writes with a strange detachment about how much and in how many ways she wanted to be close to him (and how the memories of isolated instances where she got to were so bright in her mind). I loved the bit where she kissed him on the hand because she didn't quite know how to express love for her father, and how she loved playing airplane with him as a child because there were so few opportunities to touch him and she wasn't sure how to create those opportunities. She was a worried child--one who went through a longish bout with severe OCD--and she grew up in a very strange atmosphere associated with a funeral home ("fun home"), ultimately growing up with some painful distance between herself and her emotions and dropping a lot of the narrative focus on her father's death (which was possibly a suicide).

I think the depiction of Alison's childhood journal was my favorite part. As she developed OCD tendencies, she began to worry about whether she was an unreliable narrator of her own life, and began to put qualifications on everything she wrote down. These eventually developed into codes in which she rarely wrote anything without covering them with the code for doubting that they were true just in case, and she spent much of her time and energy on avoiding some amorphous badness that could collect in doorways or attack her if she put her clothes on in the wrong order. I loved the various presentations of her "incantations" to ward off evil that she brought on herself by doing things wrong according to her self-appointed rules, and how she developed a creative solution for moving past her compulsions. I've noticed that when authors write about mental illnesses and anxiety, they usually tend to present OCD in very stale ways with extremely typical compulsions, and Alison's struck me as so relatable and realistic that I felt like I understood how these illogical "rules" developed. You really got a sense of what it is like to think the way she did. I never had obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I was similar to her in some ways, and I too developed my own codes and shorthand for things I didn't feel comfortable setting down in ink. (I'd journal about something I knew was related to the thing I was really journaling about, and then I'd know from context what happened, but no one else would. And I developed a literal code language that I'd sometimes write in if I wanted to be frank but never worry that someone would read it.)

Another thing I ADORED were the small details that made me feel like I was rooting through a box of her unsorted scrapbook items. Especially when she reproduced the phone message that told her to call home when her dad got hit by a truck. The person who took the message misspelled her name as "Allison." It's realism like that that makes it so accessible and personal. Same with that lovely little game her family played where the children would point a flashlight at the ceiling looking for ants, while their grandmother would categorize them. Things like this capture the is-ness of family so completely. And her father was hit by a Sunbeam bread truck. I saw Sunbeam bread on a table in a later panel that depicted an earlier happening, and many of the small items in the graphic novel had brand names on them.

And there were SO many beautiful moments that were also really, really tragic. It was so poignant when she wondered whether coming out to her parents had in any way caused her dad to jump in front of a truck, and suggested that maybe she sort of hopes that it WAS connected because it's one of the only connections she had to the man. Same with the ghastly grins she and her brother exchanged when they saw each other for the first time after their dad's death. There was so much there in that exchange of an inappropriate smile. When you think about it, reactions to death kind of can't be inappropriate, because it's such an absurd thing to happen--a person is deleted. They grinned. Same with how she sometimes laughed when she told people about it, to the point that they thought she was making it up. (I loved that she cried earnestly with her girlfriend shortly after it happened, though, and that that was kind of it--she couldn't access more emotion after that, though this book shows many, many nuanced emotions surrounding her feelings about him.) The way Alison enjoyed relaying the tragic happenings through deadpan to vicariously absorb others' shock and grief was very, very interesting.

And her home environment--she lived in a strange house that her dad was always decorating and restoring, and she felt that he cared more about those things and put more of himself into them than he did into his family. That she and her brothers and mother were sort of like furnishings to him, to complete a picture, because that's what lives in a home--a family, consisting of a man and wife with their kids. I love that she referred to him as "indifferent to the human cost of his projects," and that she wondered if the mythic Daedalus was sad about Icarus's wings failing not because he crashed into the sea and drowned, but because they represented a design failure. (The mythic invocations throughout were fabulous, and usually not particularly obscure.)

It's so funny that she initially didn't understand the humor in The Addams Family cartoon book she had because her own life had such a similar spooky aesthetic (mom looked like Morticia, she herself looked like Wednesday, house was sort of gothic and occasionally invaded by bats, they literally had a funeral home for a family business which involved playing around corpses and considering cemeteries to be playgrounds). This was the norm, and this was family. It was also GREAT how she said her father's showy library would normally come across as pretentious to people but it wasn't a pretense because that's how he really was. She later talked about Gatsby having a library full of unread books and how they represented a fictional life, while her father's library full of creased, obviously read books also represented a fictional life. Dang, that's moving. And haunting. As was the story about her mom using a tape recorder to practice her acting lines and realizing she had been taping over her dead husband's voice--on a tape they'd both been using for their individual arts and work. I loved that juxtaposition.

Overall I just adored coming into this world and being moved, disturbed, delighted, and shocked by this raw and honest depiction of a life and family. Most of it was nothing like my own life, but the fact that I felt like I recognized so much of it is a testament to how accessible and authentic it felt throughout. Blown away!

While I've been aware of and have sporadically read Alison Bechdel's DYKES... work over the years, I came to FUN HOME as a fan of graphic novels in general, with Art Speigelman's MAUS books being my own gold standard. I suspect it's merely a coincidence that both are father-child memoirs, but after reading FUN HOME, I could also make the case for it being no coincidence at all. FUN HOME tells a deep and touching story in a magnificent way. Bechdel gives you up front what appear to be basic facts about her history, but then she circles back over those facts as the story unfolds; you read the facts a second or third time with a slightly different context and those facts take on a richer meaning, or they illuminate the story in a new light; sometimes, they make you flip back to the first time she told them, so you can compare and ponder. You gradually find yourself deep in the weeds with these facts, and I mean that in a good way. You think about the pieces and parts of her father's story, and you wonder which angle is the truest one. Did he, or didn't he? I'm not sure I'm sure.

Bechdel parallels the mysteries of her father's story with her personal history of coming out; this, too, is wonderfully revealed in all its confusions and complexities.

Last, but not at all least, consider the illustrations, which are divine. Not only do they draw you into them on their face value as graceful depictions of the story she's telling, but they are full of interesting visual clues to the plots as they unfold. I can't wait to go back and reread this book, looking carefully for the references to the coming actions or occurrences. The illustrations also contain lots of cultural touchstones, product logos and the like, which give them yet another element of fun.

This book is elegant, both humorous and poignant, and quite a revelation.

I just want to say, I had never read Alison Bechdel before I read a review of this book in Bitch Magazine. I picked it up and am now a huge fan of hers. This book is incredibly well thought-out and I think that many people will see their own story reflected in hers in that, as a child (as a human for that matter), you see your parents as end-all, be-all, endlessly fascinating human beings...almost as if they were Adam and Eve...It's such a strange paradox in that they existed for a long time before you did, they they do or don't take care of you, that no matter what the status, everyone has parents...you pore over seeminly innocuous details of their lives searching for some "truth", you compare them favorably and unfavorably to other people's parents...you put together pieces of the puzzle for yourself where there is no information...but at the end of the day, they are just people who make mistakes, no more, no less. This story is mainly about a daughter's fascination with her father and his life/secrets, an attempt to get to the root of a completely tragic experience and a reconciliation with herself and her own grief and (misplaced) guilt.

I met Alison at the NYC Comic Con and she was pretty fascinating herself. This book has been a obvious victory for her as well as a labor of love and a harrowing journey. Once I finished this book, I bought the DTWOF books and was bowled over. It's a twenty year long soap opera with aging characters, intricate story lines, whip-smart commentary on social, governmental and civil rights issues, and funny too boot.

This is only the second graphic novel I've ever read, so my basis for critique is limited. That being said, I really, really enjoyed Fun Home. Thoughts:

Positive
- The honesty. It's hard to write about yourself and your family.
- The coming-of-age aspect. Given the fact that it's in a newer-to-me format makes it even more intriguing.
- The father-daughter relationship. No matter what you're story they're complex.
- The humor. There's a dry wit to the book that's appealing,
- The quirk. Nothing is random, but everything is different.

Is it for everyone? Nope. But if you have an open mind you'll love it.

Despite her Athena-like beauty and wisdom, The Stern Librarian is of mortal father born. Therefore, I was greatly moved by this complex exploration of a father daughter relationship, rendered in words and drawings. It is the story of the author's discovery of her identity as a lesbian at the same time that she learns shocking secrets about her father, who in short order commits suicide. From his daughter's lovely black, white and teal-green drawings, Bruce Bechdel looks like a cross between Woody Allen and Hank Azaria's character in The Birdcage. Bruce, his daughter writes, was more Martha Stewart than Jimmy Stewart. Much of the complexity of this memoir is acquired from its literary allusions. Father, an English teacher and mortician, and daughter connect through books, a "cool, aesthetic" bond which was, alas, all she had in a home where dad treated his antiques like children, and his children like furniture. Who more than the Stern Librarian would love all the references to the Fitzgeralds, Proust, Joyce and Wilde? My eyes grew misty behind cat's eye glasses when I read that Ms. Bechdel derived the courage to come out by the books she discovered at her public library. But as much as I appreciated all the literary connections, it was really the character of the father, that lover of Chippendale furniture and the Chippendales, which captivated me. Why did he chose to marry and have children, why did he live in rural Beech Creek, PA rather than a big city, why did he hate himself so much? Bruce's passion for creating a faultless world, and placing his wife and children in that stage set, struck me as the same striving for parcosm that fired Walt Disney and led to the creation of Disneyland. You will wonder along with his daughter how Bruce would have fared had he lived past 1980. The Stern Librarian (I will never be plutoed).

I got this book as required reading for a women's studies class in a section about "growing up girls". I was pretty thrilled to read it because when a class assigns a comic book it's usually and easier or more fast paced read- a nice change from most required reading. But this ended up not to be your average comic book. The story itself is an interesting mix of family dynamics and the growth of an individual. Literary references pop up everywhere and it's a lot of fun to give through to the comparisons that Bechdel poses. And the art!

Fun Home is an autobiographical comic written in a nuanced, literary style, intermingling the stories of the author's coming to grips with her sexual identity and her closeted father's untimely death. Bechdel, author of Dykes to Watch Out For, draws in a style that meshes comfortably with her narrative, neither outshining nor underwhelming it. To consider this comic simple autobiography, however, would be a disservice. Through its pages one sees the trials and tribulations suffered by generations of queer America, both in the cities and in the small towns of America.

This novel will appeal to all readers who enjoy thoughtful literature. Bechdel's work is clever, emotionally gripping in a way that moves beyond simple feelings such as joy or anger and into the strange sensations (or lack thereof) that arise at life's crossroads. She includes many snippets of other authors' works when the characters are reading, using the texts to replicate their various epiphanies, from Camus' The Stranger to Pauline Reage's The Story of O.

I read this book originally for a college course, but fell in love with Bechdel's work. Since reading Fun Home I've gone on to read everything she has written. I should also mention that this is the first graphic memoir that I'd ever read, and it started me down a path of graphic memoir love.

Bechdel's writing is wry, witty, and smart. Her illustrations - at once beautiful and highly detailed, as well as actually lending themselves to symbolism and foreshadowing - are finely wrought. I'd say that this book is especially for those with a love of classic literature, as that is a theme in this memoir.

I don't want to give away the plot, but if you are interested in an intellectually stimulating, emotionally involving, unusual, and intense story of Bechdel's life, then this is the one for you.

The humor is rather dry. However the depiction of a family with deep secrets, growing up to learn them, and navigating the way to adulthood is SPOT ON. I was prepared NOT to like this book as prior Bechdel materials are only so-so to me. This is some of her best work. While this book may elicit a fairly negative response in some readers, the pecadillos of any family are as unique as they are both unseen by outsiders and yet their existence is universal across all families (if truth be known). Recognition of that fact is unsettling. Bechdel handles a tricky subject with obvious care and sensitivity.

Bechdel's Fun Home is an extraordinary memoir--all the more if one reflects on how much she's grown as an artist since she began Dykes to Watch Out For. This is simultaneously the story of her coming of age and her father's closeted life. It is also a highly literary memoir of reading, full of the kind of literary allusions that the wunderkind author of Special Topics in Calamity Physics tried to pull off but couldn't. Not a single reference is wasted, each allusion illustrates what it means to be shaped by a life of books, to find meaning and desire in them. And not a frame is wasted. Readers should spend time on the composition and content of each frame in the text. Don't miss this one. If you haven't yet realized what the graphic novel can be, check this one out. You'll be a convert.

I read through Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel in one sitting, steamrolling through it like it was my job.

This book is categorized as a graphic novel, and I see it completely that way. It's very wordy, and Bechdel's style is spare, though there are thoughtful details that stick out: wrinkles on her parents' faces; exact passages from books and plays; the awnings of her childhood home. She kept a journal when young, and this book seems almost more like a review of that journal, fleshing the words out with remembered images and feelings.

Her use of text as an image is interesting, and though it's a true reflection of her past, I felt it a little overused. Her journal entries, illustrated, are an example, her childish scrawls being overcome by OCD symbols and slashes being important but not so much so that every little bit had to be illustrated. Her father and she had their best correspondences through letters, and she illustrates both his profuse knowledge about the books she was reading and also some of his old love letters to her mother when he was in the army. So much illutrated text--I tended to simply skim over them and not read their handwritten messages.

I liked the photographs that she drew in, however. The style of drawing changes in these photographs, looking more realistic, as if trying to say something about the difference between truth and illusion when these pictures were taken, and are interestingly juxtaposed with her comical hand holding them.

All right, enough essay-writing. I thought that the characterizations of her mother and father were brilliant, though at the expense of the rest of her family and ultimately of the author/narrator herself. You get the sense that she's somewhat of an aloof personality, but how much of that carries over after the funeral and into the rest of her life is unknown.

The book is less of a catharsis and more of a realization of how she was a mirror image of her father, a theme that resonates with me quite strongly.

Whether or not you are a comic lover, you can enjoy this novel. There aren't any of those comical tropes of 'bam!' or 'single bound!', or even much digression from standard, square panels, but the subject matter is so compelling that you won't even care. This is not an action or comedy; the nearest comparison that a non-geek might know is Maus by Art Spiegelman, though the subject matter of course is not so apocalyptic.

On the other hand, if you love action-packed stuff, then this might not be for you. Though there are a few pages that would push a movie into R-rated territory, there isn't any violence or much foul language--systemic of a world where Bechdel grew up, not knowing the 'seedy' things that her father did yet knowing that there was some sort of undercurrent.

I gave this book 5 stars, despite my nitpicking, because this is a seriously good piece of work that everyone should read. It's a great way to transition from the written word to the graphic novel, as it doesn't rely too heavily on comic tropes. If you like Maus, you'll love this one.

After the musical came out, I figured it was finally time to read this book. I’m mad I waited so long. Fun Home was just as amazing as everyone made it out to be. It’s received numerous awards, and for good reason.

Bechdel is amazing at telling her story. There’s more text in this book than you might expect from a comic, which means it will take you a little bit longer to read. But everything is poignant and well thought-out. Bechdel doesn’t completely understand herself, and she doesn’t pretend she does. She is brutally honest about everything, and she pulls no punches. It’s a beautiful work, and the expressiveness of her characters strongly roots you in her childhood.

I don’t know what else to say but that it was amazing. I wish I had read this as a teenager because it would have helped everything make more sense.

I am not going to go into elaborate detail becauase i feel the other reviewers did a wonderful job.

This authobiography is done in her natural cartoon stage.

It does include extensive vocabulary and a plethora of illusions - such as to 'The Great Gatsby', Greek Mythology (mainly Icarus), 'Ulyssus', etc...

It is done in a moving way - one that makes you want to keep reading, while momentarily wiping the tears from your eyes.

It is basically about her life - how she is a lesbian and her father is a gay (though never offically came out). How she is manly - what her father is supposed to represent; while he is feminine - what she is supposed to represent. Though her and her father have this in common, they are not close - though both seem to push for closeness...

Her father grew up and lived in Pennsylvania (where Allison Bechdel was born and raised, too)in a small rural, homophobic town. He read all of the time - as a way to excape reality and fade into fiction. He was very intelectual; though often lead down many illegal roads - such as his fasination with young men.

I found this book very touching. The moral of her life is about how despite the walls that seperate one from their family, the love is there (whether it is stated or implied). Her father did not know how to be a father to his children, but instead lived through his historical restorations and his novels. She makes it avid that it does not matter what aspect took her fathers life (suicide or fright from a snake), she loves and respects him for who he was.

Note to warning, this autobiography is done in cartoon form - with some scenes being semi-softcorn pornographic (but it adds to the multi-dementions of the autobiography).

By the end of the autobiography, you feel like you are a part of the Bechdel family, understanding their strengths as a family while feeling their weakness of seperation and individuality (which leads, she so points out, to compulsion).

I highly, highly recommend this autobiography!

Worthy of more than 5 starts! :)

This was very good. It's a graphic novel that weaves several stories together. One of the main two stories is about Bechdel's father who was a very interesting man -- accomplished renovator and decorator of old houses, director of the family-run funeral home, teacher, lover of younger men. Yet, he presented himself to the world as straight straight straight. The second thread is about Bechdel growing up and how she felt around her father ... and coming out as a lesbian. How the stories loop in and out--expertly done.

Highly recommended.

FUN HOME A FAMILY TRAGICOMIC is the latest work from the highly skilled, insightful, neurotic and wry-humored pen of Alison Bechdel, best known for her "Dykes to Watch Out For" comic strip. (One of the longest-running queer comic strips, "Dykes to Watch Out For" is over 20 years old, has been syndicated in hundreds of papers, released in over 10 books, and is available online via the author's website.) FUN HOME is Bechdel's graphically rendered account of growing up in rural Pennsylvania in the 1960s and 70s with a particular focus on influences of her father`s life and death.

Beginning with some of Bechdel's earliest memories of her father, readers meet a man who was an intelligent, emotionally distant yet volatile, narcissistic perfectionist who struggled with secrets. Trapped in the town not only of his youth but that of his ancestors for several generations, Bechdel`s father worked in the family business, a funeral home (known in the family as the "Fun Home") established by her great-grandfather in the 19th century. In addition to his interest in local history and historic preservation, Bechdel's father was a closeted gay (or bisexual) man who had a string of affairs, primarily with younger men, throughout his life.

Divided into seven chapters, each of which deals with particular themes in her childhood, FUN HOME contains a strong emphasis on literary references. Chapters weave back and forth in time, revealing aspects of Bechdel's childhood and details of her father's death. Books and literature were an important influence in Bechdel's life growing up. Her father taught English Literature at the local high school while her mother studied theater and performed in community plays. The gothic revival home the family lived in (and which her father had restored) boasted a library. At one point Bechdel admits, "I employ these [literary] allusions ... not only as descriptive devices, but because my parents are most real to me in fictional terms" (66). It becomes apparent that literary discussion was one of the primary modes of communication between herself and her father.

Bechdel came out to her parents via a letter in the spring of 1980. Her declaration prompted her mother to point out to Bechdel that her father had been having affairs with men for years. Initially, this information appears to have been news to Bechdel, who reflects, "I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy" (58). This "upstaging" is revealed as a theme in Bechdel's life as childhood milestones, such as her menarche, were overshadowed by the family preoccupation with and response to her father facing charges of "contributing to the delinquency of a minor." Apparently, her father's closet was not entirely secret and his extramarital activities added strain to the family. Her coming out was further upstaged when her father died in a questionable "accident" (it may have been suicide) just four months after her letter.

Bechdel spent years feeling shut down yet very guilty regarding her coming out and how it may have influenced her father's death. FUN HOME details the results of Bechdel's intellectual and emotional processing of her father's death, and her relationship with this complex, intelligent, conflicted, and often remote man. A powerful example of her self awareness includes her admission, "[evidence that he was considering suicide months before Bechdel came out] would only confirm that his death was not my fault. That, in fact, it had nothing to do with me at all. And I'm reluctant to let go of that last, tenuous bond" (86).

Book-length graphic stories are not a mainstay of this reviewer's reading. However, Bechdel's clean, distinctive illustration style with its wry observations and amusing details is fun to read and examine, and drew this reader into her story quickly. Indeed, it's regrettable that this review can only include quotations and not excerpts of Bechdel's drawings. Several delightful and revealing images are included, such as her grandmother chasing a "piss-ant," her early identification with Wednesday Addams, the summer of the locusts, her teenaged diary entries, and several aspects of her own adolescent self-discoveries. One cannot help but identify with Bechdel. However, despite the pain and struggle Bechdel has had facing her father's life and death, the book is neither morose nor depressing. The author has found peace with herself in regard to her father, her childhood, and who she is today. As she says in the dedication (to her mother and brothers) " We did have a lot of fun, in spite of everything."

FUN HOME is a wonderful graphic memoir that is engaging, heartrending, funny, and thoughtful. Readers will definitely want to stop by the Fun Home for this viewing.

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.

Being a rabid fan of Bechdel's work for years now (including the two stories she did for AMERICAN SPLENDOUR back in her more sketchy-style days), I've often wondered what she would do if she had more space and time to play with. The answer is FUN HOME, and what a truly amazing work it is.

It's not as funny as an episode of DTOWF; instead, it's more true and profound as Bechdel delves into the more sobering territory of her own past. Like anyone who prefers to crack jokes at life rather than be mired down in melodrama, DTOWF has reflected Bechdel's ability to confront a problem while safely steering the reader around it to a punchline. Now she takes the reader down a new path, one that neither she nor the reader may feel entirely ocmfortable traversing, but the journey is then that much more intense. Armed with beautiful beautiful beautiful art, and a wealth of literary allusions, Bechdel reveals her past and how it was bound up in the secrets her father kept. But never does she lapse into the bogs of soppy sentimentality. Instead, the painful moments are simple and true, brought out by the aforementioned art and the direct unflowery language. A balance is struck between essaying turbulent emotional territory and retaining some detached control in the narration, producing an elegantly crafted book about fathers and daughters, coming out and staying in, and the role of personal bravery.

Readers of THE INDELIBLE ALISON BECHDEL will recognize bits from her coming out story and other short vignettes about being lesbian before knowing what that meant. Instead of feeling recycled, Bechdel reworks these moments in a fresh way and integrates them smoothly into the other material. The downside of most autobiographical comics is usually the snapshot feel of the narration creates a distance between the reader and author. Bechdel's deeper exploration of these crucial moments in her personal development echo the progression of Fun Home from a simple summary of her relationship with and image of her father and his fate to the deeper and more complex exploration of where they could intersect and where they kept themselves apart. Often, what they both had in common or wanted from each other were exactly the obstacles standing in their way.

This is turning into a book report rather than a review, so I'll just sum up here: excellent. Well worth the wait and speculation. If ever Bechdel decides to do another graphic novel, I'll be the first in line to buy it. Read this book. You will not regret it for one second.

I've read all of Ms. Bechdel's "Dykes to Watch Out For" books and always watch for her monthly column (when I can find it). But I had no idea that she had the depth, insight, and clarity that is found in "Fun Home."

Of course, her delightful drawings are in evidence, as are her warm sense of humor and generous heart. But it's the searing anecdotes that have stayed with me - the trips to NYC, the thunderstorm, the yard boys, the college experiences. All speak so truthfully and with such universality that I thought I was reading about my own family.

I don't know how long Ms. Bechdel was working on this book, but it is such an important contribution to the genre of memoirs that she could have spent a lifetime and I wouldn't be surprised. As soon as I finished reading it, I opened the book to the first page and reread it immediately. I know I will return to this book many times in the years to come.

I really liked the style the author used to tell her memoir. She used the style called 'graphic' which is an adult comic book, to put it simply. I was very moved by this book, and by all the drawings that showed so much detail. I was disappointed when the book ended, I wanted to read more..and look at more pictures. :) I have explored her website, and I am interested in reading more of her life..from the comic strip "Dykes To Watch Out For" I strongly recommend this book.

Wow. I've been trying to figure out how to start this review, but every opening sounds like it's belittling: "Proving that she can do more than her comic strip ..." or "Moving beyond her "Dykes"..." does a great disservice to Bechdel and the comic strip world she has been superbly chronicling for the past twenty-odd years. Bechdel isn't moving beyond anything here; she's just done something different.

It shouldn't come as any surprise that Bechdel is capable of producing such a great work -- she has proved time and again in both her comic strip and other media (her hilarious and much missed wall calendars from the 90s) that she can blend words, drama and humor as sharply as any. The surprise to me here is just how deeply Bechdel allows us to glimpse into her life.

"Fun Home" is no easy narrative: the story of Bechdel's family and especially her difficult father bends, buckles and then turns to reveal more truth as each chapter goes by. The art and detail are so well done that I didn't feel as though I was looking at pen and ink drawings but real photos reminiscent of Italian "fumetti" comics. When the book ended, I felt the need to go over it again and put the pieces together like a puzzle.

I first discovered Bechdel when I was a junior in college 15 years ago and I've been following her work ever since. Part of me wants to selfishly keep her as one of my own, somebody that I discovered before the mainstream and after I died, friends and family would find her books among my collection and think, "This is brilliant, if only we'd read her years ago!"

I'll probably spend the next few months saying, "You liked 'Fun Home'? Amateur! *I've* been reading Bechdel since 1991." But this book (and Bechdel's work in general) deserves a wide audience and all the success it gets.

Bravo Alison, bravo.

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'm joining the chorus of 5 star reviewers. "Fun Home" is in a class of its own like a centaur or a gryphon - a memoir and a comic book, an evisceration and a celebration - intellectually exuberant, improvising in five keys at once, heartless and heartbreaking. At times it achieves the savage surprise of poetry. I love the anarchy of its obsessions - words caper across the page, intoxicated with allusion and alliteration, while the panels detail a different level of compulsion, architectural, cartographic, fetishistic. There's not a dud page in the book; everything's alive and conflicted and absurdly complicated.

Only one cavil: am I the only one who (based on the evidence in the book) doesn't believe her father killed himself? His death is exactly the kind of clumsy tragicomic catastrophe that you'd expect, the inadvertent art of the old artificer.

Bechdel's simple prose and accompanying graphics tell the story of a girl growing up in an unhappy household with a closeted father. Focusing on her dad, who dies suddenly not long after Bechdel leaves for college, she tries to make sense of who he was and the reasons for his death. Appropriately, given that her father was an English teacher and loved the written word, Bechdel often relies on literary analogies. Despite a sometimes difficult relationship, one of her father's great loves was passed on to Bechdel, at least in some form. Bechdel paints a difficult home life without passing judgement. In simple words and graphics, she effectively relays a very personal and engaging story. I loved her story-telling, and the graphics were an exceptional, quintessential addition to the reading. A few words expand greatly in meaning through her pictures. Highly recommended--I would suggest the hard copy as it is only a few dollars more and I was disappointed once I finished and my soft copy covers were curled back completely. A lovely book worth holding on to.

Very disappointing book! Purchased the book because I wanted to see what the controversy at Duke University was all about; don't really see anything very controversial! The book is basically boring, poorly written and graphically bland! The only people who might find this book controversial are born-again Christians, Tea Party reactionaries and the Republican candidates for President! C'mon, forgetaboutit.

With beautifully illustrated, intelligent prose, Bechdel's narrative jumps around in time, but never lost me. I was struck by what an interesting and unusual character she was at a young age.

Natasha Holme
Author of Lesbian Crushes and Bulimia: A Diary on How I Acquired my Eating Disorder

A College of Charleston pick. Not an easy read, emotionally, but one I appreciated for its sincerity and frankness. As a graphic novel, it's a welcome and refreshing take on memoir, a genre I've grown increasingly weary and wary of.

I have been a fan of Ms. Bechdel for years, and I have collected all the books in her Dykes To Watch Out For series. I wasn't sure how she'd handle her autobiography, and I was pleasantly surprised to see she drew it in comic form, the same as her DTWOF series. Even for those who are not already fans, this is a must-read. It's funny, touching, sad and poignant, and I'm sure I'll read it over and over again.

I was slightly familar with Alison's comic strip.

This book blew me away!

I am a biography junkie and this one is truly amazing. It reminded me of "Harriet the Spy" meets your typical GLBT coming out story-- but sort on acid. In fact, Alison's drawings gave me the same thrill that I got when I was 11 and discovered "The Long Secret." No one's artwork or story have moved me in the same manner since.

The visual images are fantastic and the "characters" drawn with great love and much depth. I was totally moved, and inspired.

This was the first graphic novel I have ever bought or read. Alison is fantastic. Thank for sharing your amazing story.

About: Graphic novel about the author's relationship with her father.

Pros: I don't usually read graphic novels but read about this one in a "Best Graphic Novels" article in Booklist (at least I think it was Booklist) and thought it sounded interesting so I checked it out.
It did not disappoint. Interesting story, wonderful art.

Cons: This isn't really a con, but since graphic novels might be associated with the kid crowd, this one tends toward an older audience

Grade: A

If I hadn't read Art Spiegelman's "MAUS: A SURVIVORS TALE"

I probably wouldn't have read Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic." I was curious to see if Bechdel's execution of the "graphic novel" was as successful as Spiegelman's and in my opinion she doesn't just match his success she actually comes out ahead.

When comparing artwork Spiegelman wins because he had the hard task of getting people to see a human tragedy using a stereotypic group of animals as the people. It shouldn't have worked but it did.

Where Bechdel comes out the winner is in the area of interest in subject matter. By this I mean that Spiegelman wrote on a subject that is of interest to a lot of people but Bechdel wrote about something that probably appeals to a smaller slice of society, in my opinion a much harder sell. Many readers may not be interested in the relationship between a father and daughter who are both gay. Yet "Fun Home" is as compelling and important as the Spiegelman book. It too is a "survivors tale." One that shows that Bechdel knows that the long stretches of everyday life that get lost between the drama are as important as the drama in defining a life. In her attention to detail she shows us real people. And because they suffer alone they are much harder to see.

This was an amazing book--an honest, personal memoir, full of fun and awkward coming of age moments, unraveling the mystery of parents, personal identity, sprinkled with literary allusions to Odysseus and Joyce, and the most touching ending I've ever read-seen. Beautiful. . .it brought me to tears, sobs, complete catharsis. Unbelievable. One of the best books I've read in a long time.

Reading Fun Home feels like a scavenger hunt through someone else's diary. In Alison Bechdel's memoir in graphic novel form, she skillfully illustrates setting through both text and image. Myriad cultural and literary allusions assist movement and characterization "not only as descriptive devices, but because my parents are most real to me in fictional terms." Detailed drawings abound with ephemera: newspaper front pages, handwritten margin notes in dog-eared books, phone messages, dictionary definitions, field guides, maps, product labels, photographs, and letters.
Fun Home rings with honesty as Bechdel vividly recounts childhood experiences with wry humor and perspective, but never nostalgia. Witty, telling dialogue between Alison, her family and friends punctuates her often poetic narration. Both expertly depict the complicated relationship between Alison and her father, a high school English teacher with a passion for heavy literature and gothic interior design and restoration. Alison discovers he is a closeted [....] when she comes out to her parents during college, an event that both clarifies and confuses their distant connection.
The combination of Bechdel's frank and likeable tone and expert illustration lead the reader irresistibly from one frame to the next as she pieces together the memories and people that influenced her identity.

The illustrations in this books are marvelous. Whole stories were told masterfully in the ink drawn expressions of Fun Home’s characters.

The story is set in a gothic funeral home and explores the author’s stressed relationship with her father.

It’s called a dark comedy, but I saw little humor in it. Don’t get me wrong, the story, the art, the message, it is all exceptional; but I wouldn’t call it funny.

From Alison Bechdel, author of the comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For," comes a memoir of coming out and coming to terms with both the life and death of her closeted father. The funny "gay" memoir seems to be the latest trend, and I'll admit that I approached this book with more than a little trepidation. However, "Fun Home" has proven a happy surprise, a unique and first rate comic work by a truly serious artist.

It took me awhile to set down and attempt to put into words what I found so special about this book. First, this is a graphic book (a "comic" book if you will), and one that is equal parts graphic and comic in its depiction of a very real American family. Being raised in a funeral home in small town America could prove a challenge for anyone. Being an adolescent girl awakening to her own lesbianism with a closet case father who is both your High School English teacher and the local funeral director, is the stuff of great literature.

The author has an acute sense of the absurd, and an unparralleld ability to communicate life's little ironies. Without ever losing affection for her emotionally remote parents, Bechdel cuts to the heart of the matter and draws them warts and all. "Fun Home" is a genuine marvel, a truly tragicomic memoir and one of the highlights of the publishing year thus far. Don't miss it.

I have seen this book for a while at a local book store. I finally bought the book and in one sitting read the whole thing. This is the best memoir I have read in a long time. Allison Bechdel has created something very special. The book focuses in her relationship with her fathe and the similarites that come about after her father's death. This is a book I will and would recommend to anyone. As time passes this is a book I will re=read again and again. Thoughtful, honest, exhilerating.

How a graphic novel should be- once you finish your first reading, your relationship with it has just begun. It's after all a 'picture book' you can devour it in one night if you receive it in the mail by six pm and finish at three am, especially if you have a dictionary handy, ideally one that is large and musty. The book is like a poem you could read quickly, a painting you might stop flat to admire and then walk by, but closer examination reveals layers of complexity and enjoyment. Its richness is in the explication. I would think about this book on the subway and open it back up to revisit parts when I got home; now I carry it. Parts of it are oblique on the first reading; I got the distinct idea that Bechdel, whose parents were English teachers, wants her audience to experience the frustration followed by satisfaction of having to look up big words. (You know how people liked the Da Vinci code because it makes you feel vicariously cultured?) It's also fitting that this book is a candid explication of her youth, going back to revisit darker things she didn't understand at the time; it's admirable and troubling, and raises thoughts about the relationship between talent and adversity. And it is so aesthetically pleasing. Bechdel's characters' faces are perfectly expressive and she is particularly talented at portraying kids- cuteness approaching Japanese levels, but genuine and unsaccharine and with a clear memory of the demons of childhood. If you want to see the great short story comic that started this book, you have to pick up "The Indelible Alison Bechdel". It's very cool to see how that coming-out story is refined and progressed in Fun Home's less cartoony version that is still humorous in its pathos.

As a gay man, I was amazed at how much I identified with this book because it deals with the larger question of gender identity, not just sexual orientation, ie how are we imprisoned by expections of others regarding what behavior is gender appropriate. And that is just one of the many levels this books works on. LOVED IT! It is annoyingly honest, Bechdel expresses her antipathy towards the SISSYNESS of her dad, ironically enough. A rich, moving experience. I want MORE!

A friend had recommended this book and, given her immaculate taste, I picked it up without a second thought. I remembered that she had mentioned that there was something unusual about it, but I didn't recall what exactly. I purchased the book and stepped outside to find a quiet place to read. When I opened the book, I realized what set this book apart.

It's a graphic novel.

I groaned. I have never, in my nearly 40 years, read even a comic book; somehow the format has always seemed confusing to me. However, after the first few pages, I knew I was holding a very special book. Alison Bechdel's portrayal of her father and troubled family dynamic is daring and brilliant.

I'll leave it to you to pick up a copy. I can hardly praise Bechdel enough.

Picked this up by chance and found one of the best books I have ever read. The writer really is thoughtful which gives the book depth.
The book is a facinating story of an incredibly talented family living in a small town where the family lived for generations. An amazing American story.
I would love to see this on high school reading lists too because it is a coming of age book.
Don't shunt this aside on the LGBT section, it is a univerasally appealing story.

The beginning of this book seemed promising, and I particularly loved the author's father's penchant for Victorian decorating. She spends a lot of time describing the decor in the rooms of the house, and how much it stood out from the houses of her friends. The story is very much about the father, who she never really knew during his life, and has quested to discover after his mysterious death. Bechdel examines many minute details of conversations with her father, and the way their relationship paralleled those of characters in the novels he loved.

Fun Home is well-written and entertaining, but I did not have an emotional connection to the characters because I did not relate to them. They were amusing, but what I read did not resound with me.

This graphic novel is splendidly written and quite engrossing, an excellent weaving of personal history with literary classics. I went to buy this in hardback the day I read the NY Times Sunday review of this book, but my local Borders had to seek it out from the back room. I hope they have since shelved it prominently. I never buy hardbacks because of the cost, but I am so glad I bought this one. I've never read the author's comics or seen any of her other work, but I will read what she produces in the future.

If I hadn't read Art Spiegelman's "MAUS: A SURVIVORS TALE"

I probably wouldn't have read Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic." I was curious to see if Bechdel's execution of the "graphic novel" was as successful as Spiegelman's and in my opinion she doesn't just match his success she actually comes out ahead.

When comparing artwork Spiegelman wins because he had the hard task of getting people to see a human tragedy using a stereotypic group of animals as the people. It shouldn't have worked but it did.

Where Bechdel comes out the winner is in the area of interest in subject matter. By this I mean that Spiegelman wrote on a subject that is of interest to a lot of people but Bechdel wrote about something that probably appeals to a smaller slice of society, in my opinion a much harder sell. Many readers may not be interested in the relationship between a father and daughter who are both gay. Yet "Fun Home" is as compelling and important as the Spiegelman book. It too is a "survivors tale." One that shows that Bechdel knows that the long stretches of everyday life that get lost between the drama are as important as the drama in defining a life. In her attention to detail she shows us real people. And because they suffer alone they are much harder to see.

This was an amazing book--an honest, personal memoir, full of fun and awkward coming of age moments, unraveling the mystery of parents, personal identity, sprinkled with literary allusions to Odysseus and Joyce, and the most touching ending I've ever read-seen. Beautiful. . .it brought me to tears, sobs, complete catharsis. Unbelievable. One of the best books I've read in a long time.

Reading Fun Home feels like a scavenger hunt through someone else's diary. In Alison Bechdel's memoir in graphic novel form, she skillfully illustrates setting through both text and image. Myriad cultural and literary allusions assist movement and characterization "not only as descriptive devices, but because my parents are most real to me in fictional terms." Detailed drawings abound with ephemera: newspaper front pages, handwritten margin notes in dog-eared books, phone messages, dictionary definitions, field guides, maps, product labels, photographs, and letters.
Fun Home rings with honesty as Bechdel vividly recounts childhood experiences with wry humor and perspective, but never nostalgia. Witty, telling dialogue between Alison, her family and friends punctuates her often poetic narration. Both expertly depict the complicated relationship between Alison and her father, a high school English teacher with a passion for heavy literature and gothic interior design and restoration. Alison discovers he is a closeted [....] when she comes out to her parents during college, an event that both clarifies and confuses their distant connection.
The combination of Bechdel's frank and likeable tone and expert illustration lead the reader irresistibly from one frame to the next as she pieces together the memories and people that influenced her identity.

The illustrations in this books are marvelous. Whole stories were told masterfully in the ink drawn expressions of Fun Home’s characters.

The story is set in a gothic funeral home and explores the author’s stressed relationship with her father.

It’s called a dark comedy, but I saw little humor in it. Don’t get me wrong, the story, the art, the message, it is all exceptional; but I wouldn’t call it funny.

From Alison Bechdel, author of the comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For," comes a memoir of coming out and coming to terms with both the life and death of her closeted father. The funny "gay" memoir seems to be the latest trend, and I'll admit that I approached this book with more than a little trepidation. However, "Fun Home" has proven a happy surprise, a unique and first rate comic work by a truly serious artist.

It took me awhile to set down and attempt to put into words what I found so special about this book. First, this is a graphic book (a "comic" book if you will), and one that is equal parts graphic and comic in its depiction of a very real American family. Being raised in a funeral home in small town America could prove a challenge for anyone. Being an adolescent girl awakening to her own lesbianism with a closet case father who is both your High School English teacher and the local funeral director, is the stuff of great literature.

The author has an acute sense of the absurd, and an unparralleld ability to communicate life's little ironies. Without ever losing affection for her emotionally remote parents, Bechdel cuts to the heart of the matter and draws them warts and all. "Fun Home" is a genuine marvel, a truly tragicomic memoir and one of the highlights of the publishing year thus far. Don't miss it.

I have seen this book for a while at a local book store. I finally bought the book and in one sitting read the whole thing. This is the best memoir I have read in a long time. Allison Bechdel has created something very special. The book focuses in her relationship with her fathe and the similarites that come about after her father's death. This is a book I will and would recommend to anyone. As time passes this is a book I will re=read again and again. Thoughtful, honest, exhilerating.

How a graphic novel should be- once you finish your first reading, your relationship with it has just begun. It's after all a 'picture book' you can devour it in one night if you receive it in the mail by six pm and finish at three am, especially if you have a dictionary handy, ideally one that is large and musty. The book is like a poem you could read quickly, a painting you might stop flat to admire and then walk by, but closer examination reveals layers of complexity and enjoyment. Its richness is in the explication. I would think about this book on the subway and open it back up to revisit parts when I got home; now I carry it. Parts of it are oblique on the first reading; I got the distinct idea that Bechdel, whose parents were English teachers, wants her audience to experience the frustration followed by satisfaction of having to look up big words. (You know how people liked the Da Vinci code because it makes you feel vicariously cultured?) It's also fitting that this book is a candid explication of her youth, going back to revisit darker things she didn't understand at the time; it's admirable and troubling, and raises thoughts about the relationship between talent and adversity. And it is so aesthetically pleasing. Bechdel's characters' faces are perfectly expressive and she is particularly talented at portraying kids- cuteness approaching Japanese levels, but genuine and unsaccharine and with a clear memory of the demons of childhood. If you want to see the great short story comic that started this book, you have to pick up "The Indelible Alison Bechdel". It's very cool to see how that coming-out story is refined and progressed in Fun Home's less cartoony version that is still humorous in its pathos.

As a gay man, I was amazed at how much I identified with this book because it deals with the larger question of gender identity, not just sexual orientation, ie how are we imprisoned by expections of others regarding what behavior is gender appropriate. And that is just one of the many levels this books works on. LOVED IT! It is annoyingly honest, Bechdel expresses her antipathy towards the SISSYNESS of her dad, ironically enough. A rich, moving experience. I want MORE!

A friend had recommended this book and, given her immaculate taste, I picked it up without a second thought. I remembered that she had mentioned that there was something unusual about it, but I didn't recall what exactly. I purchased the book and stepped outside to find a quiet place to read. When I opened the book, I realized what set this book apart.

It's a graphic novel.

I groaned. I have never, in my nearly 40 years, read even a comic book; somehow the format has always seemed confusing to me. However, after the first few pages, I knew I was holding a very special book. Alison Bechdel's portrayal of her father and troubled family dynamic is daring and brilliant.

I'll leave it to you to pick up a copy. I can hardly praise Bechdel enough.

Picked this up by chance and found one of the best books I have ever read. The writer really is thoughtful which gives the book depth.
The book is a facinating story of an incredibly talented family living in a small town where the family lived for generations. An amazing American story.
I would love to see this on high school reading lists too because it is a coming of age book.
Don't shunt this aside on the LGBT section, it is a univerasally appealing story.

The beginning of this book seemed promising, and I particularly loved the author's father's penchant for Victorian decorating. She spends a lot of time describing the decor in the rooms of the house, and how much it stood out from the houses of her friends. The story is very much about the father, who she never really knew during his life, and has quested to discover after his mysterious death. Bechdel examines many minute details of conversations with her father, and the way their relationship paralleled those of characters in the novels he loved.

Fun Home is well-written and entertaining, but I did not have an emotional connection to the characters because I did not relate to them. They were amusing, but what I read did not resound with me.

This graphic novel is splendidly written and quite engrossing, an excellent weaving of personal history with literary classics. I went to buy this in hardback the day I read the NY Times Sunday review of this book, but my local Borders had to seek it out from the back room. I hope they have since shelved it prominently. I never buy hardbacks because of the cost, but I am so glad I bought this one. I've never read the author's comics or seen any of her other work, but I will read what she produces in the future.

A must read for all Alison Bechdel fans everywhere. Uniquely wonderful paired with her gifted cartoon images as she tells the story of her life and that of her parents in small town PA. I am not just saying this because she grew up an hour away from me, but she captures the freakish, stifling small town life of a not yet out (and for her Dad tragically never 0ut) young woman with talent living in an Addams family time warp. . . This book is dark, moody, deliciously hard to put down!!

Gay readers owe it to themselves to read this incredibly open, self exposing family portrait of the generations growing into themselves.

Ms. Bechdel has touched many of us deeply trying to make sense of some fairly creepy, freakishly isolated odd childhoods.

Her writing is equal to her art/illustrations and DTWOF cartoons we have all been enjoying for decades.

This is a sharp, literate, excruciating, and mature piece of autobiography, which should with any justice nudge Alison Bechdel from cult favorite to widespread critical recognition.

Her always appealing and humane art is given emotional depth and shadow with a layer of ink wash, which Houghton Mifflin has thankfully payed out to print in faded royal blue.

In terms of content, Bechdel ably and appropriately includes themes from Proust, Joyce, Homer, and F.Scott Fitzgerald as she strip-mines the contorted relationship between her younger self and her English teacher father.

This is a work of real emotional honesty, paired with a professional execution. It's also a welcome change from the relentless brand of masculine self-loathing dished out by R.Crumb and Harvey Pekar, and more mature than the delicate, achingly self-aware recent works by Craig Thompson.

The overall quality and insight of the work brings it beyond being just a female, feminist, or queer genre piece (all of which Bechdel has done with great aplomb in the past); with any luck it should make itself felt across the demographic bar chart.

This graphic novel is amazing.

It is a memoir graphic novel, following Alison Bechdel's life before and after her father's suicide.
The novel is rife with literary allusions (the very first page alludes to a Greek myth of Icarus and Daedalus) and depth.

I'm not "a comic book person," but this clearly shows the future of graphic novels as strong, eloquent, moving and brilliant.

Bechdel is famous for good reason.

my jaw was literally on the floow when i read Alison Bechdel's Fun Home -- more than once, sometimes for eloquence, sometimes for recognition, sometimes just because i was finally reading a comic book i could relate to. brilliant decision to illustrate and tell her story this way, i'd give this book to anyone who is grown up and might have had even a sliver of a similar experience.

The images in Alison Bechdel's graphic novel told whole stories in the people's expressions. The narration is sharp and explores her stressed relationship with her father. It's a pity he didn't live to see his daughter mature into the artist she is today.

Astonishingly, this book, which appears to cling to the essential comic strip format, is a literary experience of the highest order. Even if it didn't contain lengthy and wholly organic references to Proust, Joyce and others, it would still pack a bookish wallop. The illustrations at all times add value to the text (and vice versa), rendering the overall experience ever so much more than the sum of its parts. Bechdel creates a moody, erotic web of intimacy, and I could not put it down.

This is a carefully crafted story, beautifully integrated with literary classics, full of not-so-much surprises as confirmations in the story line. The graphics are both charming and somehow creepy--for instance, the father constantly in cut-off, short, short jeans. The memoir unfolds smoothly and without contradiction. I couldn't put this book down. Finally a graphic novel with a story of great and thoughtful depth.

So honest and beautifully written -- I absolutely love Alison Bechdel. Honest and complex, intellectual and sad. Speaks to family secrets, and questions that linger throughout childhood and into adulthood.

I am a fan of graphic novels and this is a very well done example of the genre. The drawings and text work well together and the story line is interesting. That said, it is not for everyone. There are some graphic drawings of lesbian sex and the subject matter is heavy and depressing. I realize the author is writing mostly from a child's perspective but her father's problems extended well beyond being a closeted homosexual. Despite my criticism I am going to read her new book about her relationship with her mother. It's a bit like gaping at a car wreck. You want to know what happened.

Very creatively presented. The profusion of literary allusions was a little hard to follow, but that's mostly my ignorance. I read the book in preparation for seeing the Broadway show, and it served me well for that purpose.

I bought this two weeks ago, and have re-read it approximately six times since. It's hilarious and elegant, brimming with brilliance, loss and wisdom.

Not enough bravos can ever suffice...

Also, as someone familiar with a few of the physical settings for Bechdel's work (I attended Oberlin shortly after she did), I must comment on her creepily perfect renderings of the mail room, Gay Union, library moon chairs and cinderblock dorm walls. I could smell the lake-effect snow.

Thank you, Alison, for your brilliant book and making memory so tangible.

If you enjoy graphic novels infused with acerbic wit and tug-at-your-heartstrings pathos, you will love Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. The author is able to tell the story about her unusual family life in a serious, yet light way, that is engaging and endearing. Although it is basically a serious comic book, I still found myself becoming involved with the characters and rooting for the heroine, just as I would in a novel. The book is a quick read and a fun ride.

This book is not a fun read. It can entertain, but for me it brought up those covert creepy memories of growing up with a family. I resonated with this book. It has depth. It's philisophical and personal. It's tragic mostly because of the dissonance each parent has with who they are and who their kids are. Weird as life. Thank you for putting into pictures and words what are the things many of us have trapped in our psyches. Brilliant!!!

Someone should have told me this was a book about suicide before I read it. All that I'd read about it before got so hung up on the gay stuff and failed to mention the other big trigger. The book was very good, an interesting twining of ideas from classical literature through the author's life. Still, it clobbered me.

Absolutely spell-binding story. This book conveys a very sad and puzzling life with extremely funny technique. It lacks the little current event things of Bechdel's regular strip, but has such interesting visual appeal that you don't miss them. I grieve for the stunted life it seems her father had, and hope that her generation of Bechdels have it better.

Once I started reading "Fun Home" I was immediately absorbed and

could barely put it down. It is a well-told & thoughtful

autobiography that gives the reader the essence of herself and

her family relationships (though mostly with her parents and much less so with her brothers). The courage for telling it like

it was ("[she] thinks") and chronicling of the world around her is

incredibly touching and impressive.

One of my favorite books of the past five years. I recommend this book to anyone who is looking for something interesting to read. I found it thoroughly engaging. I'm anxious to see where her writing takes her next.

This is a good graphic memoir I probably would have loved if it were not in the graphic novel format. Alison Bechdel is a skilled storyteller and graphic artist. I don't know if she's a skilled writer because she relies on her drawings to evoke the Victorian monstrosity of her childhood home and the girly dresses she abhorred. The words she uses are effective in moving the story along emotionally and temporally but without the drawings, the story is half told. I almost feel as though this should be reviewed as a film instead of a book.

Bechdel does a good job depicting a family caught up in the social upheavals of the 60s and 70s. She is honest about herself and the conflicts between childhood memory and adult perspective and understanding. I like her honesty. The way literature and popular culture are woven into the story feels natural and essential.

One example of when I would have preferred a more traditional narrative was description of Greenwich Village at that point in history. I'm from New York and spent a lot of time in the Village during that period. I didn't need to know any more about the significance of Christopher Street or the post-Stonewall atmosphere of NYC. Maybe that is a weakness of the book: is the audience too narrow? I guess I'll know the answer to that question when my well-read but decidedly non-urban, mostly straight book group discusses this next week. (They like Persepolis, but I had the same misgivings with that book.) I suspect I am just the wrong audience for graphic novels. If I run across any essays or other writings by Alison Bechdel, I will be happy to read them. And when they make the movie, I'll buy a ticket.

Ultimately, this read was pleasant but frustrating. If any graphic novel could have satisfied me, Fun Home would have - and didn't. It isn't Bechdel's fault. She's written a good graphic memoir that is, for me, lacking the emotional depth of a good memoir

This book is unlike any other I have ever read: a literate, complex and absorbing comicbook. But then again the author had a childhood quite unlike others.

In the 20/21 centuries, what can we possibly do with the pressure of our private tangled childhood pasts, especially if we eliminate the random killing, depths of alcoholism routes?

We can make art. Bechdel has used hers to make art of a high order in a book that is utterly 21st century: quick to read, nuanced and compelling, making the idiosyncratic universal.

This was one of the most engaging and crushingly sad books I've ever read. Most authors are unable to write about agonizing personal history without being mawkish or manipulative. But Bechdel tells a raw and gripping story with not a hint of cheap sentimentality.

Jennifer Parello, author of Dateland

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)

I'm somewhat impressed that I somehow managed to read one of the New York Times' Notable Books of 2006 while it's still 2006, and before they named it as a notable book. Completely unlike me. But there it is. My closet trendiness is finally leaking out.

And as tempting as it is to use that paragraph as a segue into a review of Fun Home, I can't figure out a way to do it that isn't monstrously cheesy, so I'll leave it where it stands.

As sick of the whole memoir thing as I am, there are still a few that generate enough buzz from the trustworthy to merit picking up while they're still somewhat fresh. Fun Home has been one of them since months before it came out, and for the most part, the buzz seems warranted. (The part that's not "most" is because, well, it's a memoir, and in today's climate, where everyone from the Bush's pet dog to the janitor of the local brothel is publishing a memoir, publishing a memoir in and of itself is cause for skepticism.) Bechdel takes her childhood journal and reworks it with an adult sensibility, but doesn't throw out the awkward, painful bits. Or, if she did, she left enough of them in to make it scan.

At its heart, Fun Home is the story of the conflict between Bechdel and her father, both of whom were struggling with sexuality issues during Bechdel's adolescence; she eventually came out, while her father stayed closeted until his death (whether accident or suicide, a question unanswered to this day). Bechdel picks at the relationship, worries it like a dog at a neighbor's welcome mat, piecing her father together from a tapestry of memories and journal entries, telling the story of the rest of her somewhat dysfunctional family (yes, only somewhat; no Augusten Burroughs or David Sedaris here, thankfully) in the process. And while she was doing so, I kind of wondered where it was all going, as I usually do with memoirs-- whether it would resolve, or whether it would just end. Because life is not well known for its resolutions.

Bechdel, however, should be. The final, page-sized frame of Fun Home is both a surprise and the only correct ending to the book, and it moves the book from "okay, decent memoir" to "wow, that works." She does what she does, and she does it well. Well enough that sometimes it sneaks up on you. ***

I purchased this book for a dear friend, and so his comments to me about it were that of great likeness. He absolutely loved the book--and I think he read it in less than a week. It was so interesting, he couldn't put it down! So this has to be one of the best books published recently.

I can only describe this as a comic novel. It is a new voice for me to hear from Alison, and one that I would gladly here more from. The story is not entirely sad, and there are some extremely drily ironic moments. A very good, easy read that I shared equally well with my wife, and my 19 year-old daughter. My sister is next.

Clearly one of the best memoirs or graphic novels. It's literate without being too pretentious, but it did make me reach for the dictionary a couple times. Alison's story and her memories and musings on her father, hometown, college life, and books make each page a pleasure. Best book I've read in the past year.

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.

I will say right now that my rating is in between because I do enjoy the art work.

This book was recommended to me by who I can't remember. Although I like graphic novels I probably would not have read it but only did because of the recommendation.

I respect very much the art work and the story she is trying to tell but for it was not that interesting. Maybe not that it wasn't interesting but the view point and the literature references were just over my head or not the way I would have gone. It is not my story to tell though.

Although Miss Bechdel may have found some therapeutic instrument in telling her story. Too many books mentions that I didn't know or in parts the story seemed so dark I did not enjoy. So while I think the art is great but the moments told in this memoir are only okay.

One of my favorite books of the past five years. I recommend this book to anyone who is looking for something interesting to read. I found it thoroughly engaging. I'm anxious to see where her writing takes her next.

This is a good graphic memoir I probably would have loved if it were not in the graphic novel format. Alison Bechdel is a skilled storyteller and graphic artist. I don't know if she's a skilled writer because she relies on her drawings to evoke the Victorian monstrosity of her childhood home and the girly dresses she abhorred. The words she uses are effective in moving the story along emotionally and temporally but without the drawings, the story is half told. I almost feel as though this should be reviewed as a film instead of a book.

Bechdel does a good job depicting a family caught up in the social upheavals of the 60s and 70s. She is honest about herself and the conflicts between childhood memory and adult perspective and understanding. I like her honesty. The way literature and popular culture are woven into the story feels natural and essential.

One example of when I would have preferred a more traditional narrative was description of Greenwich Village at that point in history. I'm from New York and spent a lot of time in the Village during that period. I didn't need to know any more about the significance of Christopher Street or the post-Stonewall atmosphere of NYC. Maybe that is a weakness of the book: is the audience too narrow? I guess I'll know the answer to that question when my well-read but decidedly non-urban, mostly straight book group discusses this next week. (They like Persepolis, but I had the same misgivings with that book.) I suspect I am just the wrong audience for graphic novels. If I run across any essays or other writings by Alison Bechdel, I will be happy to read them. And when they make the movie, I'll buy a ticket.

Ultimately, this read was pleasant but frustrating. If any graphic novel could have satisfied me, Fun Home would have - and didn't. It isn't Bechdel's fault. She's written a good graphic memoir that is, for me, lacking the emotional depth of a good memoir

This book is unlike any other I have ever read: a literate, complex and absorbing comicbook. But then again the author had a childhood quite unlike others.

In the 20/21 centuries, what can we possibly do with the pressure of our private tangled childhood pasts, especially if we eliminate the random killing, depths of alcoholism routes?

We can make art. Bechdel has used hers to make art of a high order in a book that is utterly 21st century: quick to read, nuanced and compelling, making the idiosyncratic universal.

This was one of the most engaging and crushingly sad books I've ever read. Most authors are unable to write about agonizing personal history without being mawkish or manipulative. But Bechdel tells a raw and gripping story with not a hint of cheap sentimentality.

Jennifer Parello, author of Dateland

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)

I'm somewhat impressed that I somehow managed to read one of the New York Times' Notable Books of 2006 while it's still 2006, and before they named it as a notable book. Completely unlike me. But there it is. My closet trendiness is finally leaking out.

And as tempting as it is to use that paragraph as a segue into a review of Fun Home, I can't figure out a way to do it that isn't monstrously cheesy, so I'll leave it where it stands.

As sick of the whole memoir thing as I am, there are still a few that generate enough buzz from the trustworthy to merit picking up while they're still somewhat fresh. Fun Home has been one of them since months before it came out, and for the most part, the buzz seems warranted. (The part that's not "most" is because, well, it's a memoir, and in today's climate, where everyone from the Bush's pet dog to the janitor of the local brothel is publishing a memoir, publishing a memoir in and of itself is cause for skepticism.) Bechdel takes her childhood journal and reworks it with an adult sensibility, but doesn't throw out the awkward, painful bits. Or, if she did, she left enough of them in to make it scan.

At its heart, Fun Home is the story of the conflict between Bechdel and her father, both of whom were struggling with sexuality issues during Bechdel's adolescence; she eventually came out, while her father stayed closeted until his death (whether accident or suicide, a question unanswered to this day). Bechdel picks at the relationship, worries it like a dog at a neighbor's welcome mat, piecing her father together from a tapestry of memories and journal entries, telling the story of the rest of her somewhat dysfunctional family (yes, only somewhat; no Augusten Burroughs or David Sedaris here, thankfully) in the process. And while she was doing so, I kind of wondered where it was all going, as I usually do with memoirs-- whether it would resolve, or whether it would just end. Because life is not well known for its resolutions.

Bechdel, however, should be. The final, page-sized frame of Fun Home is both a surprise and the only correct ending to the book, and it moves the book from "okay, decent memoir" to "wow, that works." She does what she does, and she does it well. Well enough that sometimes it sneaks up on you. ***

I purchased this book for a dear friend, and so his comments to me about it were that of great likeness. He absolutely loved the book--and I think he read it in less than a week. It was so interesting, he couldn't put it down! So this has to be one of the best books published recently.

I can only describe this as a comic novel. It is a new voice for me to hear from Alison, and one that I would gladly here more from. The story is not entirely sad, and there are some extremely drily ironic moments. A very good, easy read that I shared equally well with my wife, and my 19 year-old daughter. My sister is next.

Clearly one of the best memoirs or graphic novels. It's literate without being too pretentious, but it did make me reach for the dictionary a couple times. Alison's story and her memories and musings on her father, hometown, college life, and books make each page a pleasure. Best book I've read in the past year.

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.

I will say right now that my rating is in between because I do enjoy the art work.

This book was recommended to me by who I can't remember. Although I like graphic novels I probably would not have read it but only did because of the recommendation.

I respect very much the art work and the story she is trying to tell but for it was not that interesting. Maybe not that it wasn't interesting but the view point and the literature references were just over my head or not the way I would have gone. It is not my story to tell though.

Although Miss Bechdel may have found some therapeutic instrument in telling her story. Too many books mentions that I didn't know or in parts the story seemed so dark I did not enjoy. So while I think the art is great but the moments told in this memoir are only okay.

So well drawn and written, but ultimately unsatisfying. I'll be honest and say I don't know exactly why it didn't satisfy because I did like the story and the drawings are great, but I'll take a stab at it...

Fun Home seems to try too hard to be a classic novel (with all its richness and intellectual demands), but ends up being (almost) like a "novel for dummies" instead of a graphic novel. Perhaps this is because the words carry too much of the story and the pictures don't take you far enough away from the words. A graphic novel should expand (upon being read) in both directions - into the visual and verbal imaginations of the reader. I'm not sure where the fault lies in Fun Home, but I suspect the verbal side of the story (while very well written) is simply not suggestive enough and so doesn't expand in the reader's mind.

I'd like to see an expanded version of Fun Home, with the same overall story, and even the same words (though spread over more pages), but fleshed out with more imagery. This could actually add a suggestiveness to the words that I didn't experience on my reading.

excruciatingly touching. I checked this book out at a public lib (I'm an impoverished international grad student who are not even allowed to have a part time job in the US), but guess I will buy several copies for my friends and myself.

Loved this. My reading group will be reading this one!! She's bright, intelligent and I hope we can expect more from Alison Bechdel.

Was very surprised when I received this book to see that it was in "comic form." The illustrations were superb as well as the content of the novel.

Bechdel's father was an intriguing enough character to keep me reading. Other than that, the story seemed aimless and pretentious. I did not have much interest in Alison's exploration of her homosexuality, and the references to literature and philosophy seemed present for the purpose of the author's bragging rather than advancing the story. There is real shortage of autobiographical graphic novels, but this one is probably my least favorite of those I have read so far.

I purchased this book for my Kindle Voyage and was unable to download it because the formatting wasn't compatible with my kindle. Come on, the store! If you sell a book as a kindle version it should at least be able to be downloaded onto a kindle!

I bought this on the basis of an NPR interview I heard where this book was being discussed by the author. I was intrigued by the premise. The interviewer referred to it several times as being "graphic", which I unwittingly took to mean intense or full of sharp detail. When I got it and discovered it was -- and I know this will tick some people off -- a comic book. I know, I know, a "graphic novel", but to me it's a comic book and I couldn't get into it. My fault, I should have done more due diligence.

I began to read this book under the pressure of glowing reviews and constant buzz. I couldn't get away from the fact that people said it was just amazing. So, naturally, I gave it a try

Not to be anticlimactic or anything, but I stopped reading the book around page 100.

Maybe it's because I'm not a lesbian, maybe it's because I grew up in a fairly well-adjusted home with supportive parents, but absolutely nothing in this book spoke to me. I understand that this work must have been incredibly cathartic for Ms. Bechdel, and I'm glad that she got it off of her chest, but I don't really see what's in it for me.

The book prides itself in being able to rattle off literary reference after literary reference, but to me the book comes of as being supported solely by these allusions with nothing underneath to keep the reader interested. How many times do I need to hear about what Proust thinks of the situation she's in? What about her opinions? To me, the book comes of as elietist and smugly over-intellectual. I just feel like she's showing off, how she can tie images of her father up with the myth of the Minotaur, how she can draw all these paralells between his life and the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Allusions are a great thing and can add some beautiful depth to the story, but when each following page contains yet another "witty" allusion, it just gets tiresome.

Again, this is my opinion. I understand that this book means a lot to a lot of people, but I just wasn't feeling it

I understand most of her references, but without a working knowledge of literary theory, don't even attempt. Obviously in her mind you aren't worthy of her exposition that is just as fancy as her fathers decorations.

As someone who had read and appreciated DTWOF, and after having read many positive reviews, I had high expectations for Fun Home.

Alas, I had the same feelings as when I watched the Richard Pryor's special after he recovered from burning himself while freebasing. That is, the material should have been locked up with all the other notes from private sessions with the author's psychologist. What is our role as the observer participant in these presentations? Are we an appreciative audience viewing a higher art form or merely a passive therapeutic tool used for a feeble attempt at catharsis? Does our participation serve to soothe the author's lost soul or merely negate the requirement that the author face their demons in the privacy of their own self-generated and self-imposed hell?

The question remains, if you appreciate this book, is it because you have rationalizations to make of your own? Only you can determine your validity in the world, neither story nor audience can diminish your responsibilities or vicariously provide for your atonement. With all sincerity, I wish you safe travels and good luck!

I ordered this book, as it was a required reading for incoming Freshmen at Duke University. One student refused to read it, as he thought it was a pornographic book. The book (all in comic strip style) is an easy read, because of its style. However, the story line is about a father who becomes a bisexual person, and his daughter, who at age twelve decides she is a lesbian. The only reason I can think of to require reading such a book, is to promote the homosexual life style. I see no other redeeming features. And toward the end of the book, it does picture sexual activity between two women, again in comic book style. I wonder if the committee who selected this book had read it. There are so many books that are uplifting in moral, ethical and good neighbor life styles, why was this one selected? Maybe the subtitle accurately describes the book reason for being.