Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

New
Paperback
2006
$16.59

One of the most eagerly anticipated graphic memoirs of recent years, Fun Home is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Alison Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high-school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and the family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive.

Synopsis

One of the most eagerly anticipated graphic memoirs of recent years, Fun Home is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Alison Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high-school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and the family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 240
Edition: 1
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Published: 14 Sep 2006
ISBN 10: 0224080512
ISBN 13: 9780224080514
Book Overview: The bestselling memoir from a cult favourite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, the New York Times, and People.

Media Reviews

It is a pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics and memoir) in multiple new directions, with panels that combine the detail and technical proficiency of R. Crumb with a seriousness, emotional complexity and innovation completely its own... A comic book for lovers of words! Bechdel's rich language and precise images combine to create a lush piece of work - a memoir where concision and detail are melded for maximum, obsessive density * New York Times *
Bechdel's memoir offers a graphic narrative of uncommon richness, depth, literary resonance and psychological complexity . . . shares [much] in spirit with the work of Mary Karr, Tobias Wolff, and other contemporary memoirists of considerable literary accomplishement * Kirkus Reviews *
The recursively told story, which revisits the sites of tragic desperation again and again, hits notes that resemble Jeanette Winterson at her best... She's made a story that's quiet, dignified and not easy to put down * Publishers Weekly *
One of the very best graphic novels ever * Booklist *
A brilliant, bleakly hilarious memoir in comic-book form * Time *

Author Bio

Alison Bechdel is the author of the bestselling memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and, most recently, Are You My Mother? For twenty-five years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life - queer and otherwise - considered 'one of the pre-eminent oeuvres in the comics genre.' Alison Bechdel is guest editor of Best American Comics, 2011, and has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney's, Entertainment Weekly, Granta, and the New York Times Book Review.