Fun Home

A Family Tragicomic

232 pages

English language

Published June 5, 2007 by Mariner Books.

ISBN:
978-0-618-87171-1
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4 stars (1 review)

This book takes its place alongside the unnerving, memorable, darkly funny family memoirs of Augusten Burroughs and Mary Karr. It's a father-daughter tale perfectly suited to the graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian house, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned 'fun home, ' as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive.

3 editions

Review of 'Fun Home' on 'Storygraph'

4 stars



You can tell there is years of work in here. At the same time, it seems unfinished. There's an open question in Bechdel's tale -- how does she know she had an impact in him? Any interest in her at all, it seems, is about her interests as a proxy for his own. His books and studies are given to her, his choice of clothes and ideas, and to the extent that she deviates from that, his displeasure is about the frustration of his desires.

We don't. She doesn't. We can only guess how much love there was.

...man, this book is cold.