Fun Home

Jan 20, 2011 Paul rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: graphic-novelly-stuff

THIS JUST IN : P BRYANT FAILS HIP GRAPHIC NOVEL TEST

Fun Home, a cripplingly hip graphic novel, is....

Yes?

It's....

YES??

Well, let's see, it's, you know, all right, good, yes, nods head, hummphs into beard, pulls earlobe, raises eyebrows, waves hands in a vague direction, shifts about in seat. You know. Don't get me wrong. It was good. Yes. Cool, clever, really hip, I mean, really, as far as I can tell, my hipometer needs a new battery I think; it was not the least bit funny, but that's not such a...more

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Sep 01, 2011 oriana rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2010, too-smart-for-their-own-good, books-with-pix

I forgot to mention, for the record, that this was book #4 for Jugs & Capes, my amazing all-girl graphic-novel book club. We discussed it this evening over truffle-salted popcorn and green tea gelato. Isn't that grand?

You can also read this review (slightly tweaked) on CCLaP.

***

I've been wanting to read this book for years. Isn't it crazy that I had to start an entire graphic novel book club to somehow give myself permission to read it?

Perhaps. But who cares about the machinations I forced...more

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Dec 04, 2012 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: hagging-out, favorites

I wonder pretty often what the point of writing books is, mostly because, well, you know, there are already so many of them...

More narrowly, I think I kind of understand why people feel compelled to write memoirs, but I do wonder -- as I remain stalled out on page 236 of Martin Amis's Experience -- why anyone ever reads them.

Fun Home answers both of these questions for me, plus a third larger one about what the point is of being alive. It seems like sort of a confusing and overwhelming waste som...more I wonder pretty often what the point of writing books is, mostly because, well, you know, there are already so many of them...

More narrowly, I think I kind of understand why people feel compelled to write memoirs, but I do wonder -- as I remain stalled out on page 236 of Martin Amis's Experience -- why anyone ever reads them.

Fun Home answers both of these questions for me, plus a third larger one about what the point is of being alive. It seems like sort of a confusing and overwhelming waste sometimes, doesn't it? All the complexity and pain and even the great gorgeous moments in a life, because what's it all for, what's its purpose...? Can any sense or use ever be made of it really?

A: Yup!

I've been meaning to read this since it came out six years ago, and just finally got around to it. Fun Home blew my mind in that way that makes me want to devolve to swooningly banal reviewspeak and pronounce it a "stunning achievement."

Fun Home is a Stunning Achievement. I feel like I don't need to describe it because pretty much everyone else on the planet has read it by now, but in case you somehow didn't, it's a memoir written in comic form focusing primarily on Bechdel's relationship with her father, who probably (but not definitely) killed himself, following decades of small-town life as a passionate house restorer/English teacher/funeral home proprietor/tormented closet case, shortly after his daughter's announcement that she was gay. In the book, Bechdel analyzes her memories, experiences and extant documents, and uses literature to try to understand her father and tell a story about her family and about herself.

The result was so engaging and so just, well this is dumb, but meaningful that I'm really at a loss for anything unstupid to say. While reading this, I kept thinking that I was glad in a way that a lot of these things happened, that these people were who they were, because that's what led to this book being made and I was so happy to read it. From the opening pages I was so overwhelmed by her drawings and descriptions of her family's house that the book seemed almost magical to me for containing them -- sort of like, without this book, what would have been the point of that house, what would have been the point of this time period, of all these people? They all just would've come and gone, and been known by such a small number of individuals who would've eventually forgotten them. There is some process of retrieval at work here that grants these lost settings and people and events some existence that feels so vital -- it's like Proust, one of the literary references she explores, how she goes back in time to collect them -- that it's actually kind of transcendent. I'm not explaining it clearly at all, but this process is what I think art's for: making something out of the world that grants that world some extra sense or meaning beyond itself.

Though man... Faulkner wrote that "If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies," but I bet Faulkner never knew an autobiographical comic book artist! If he had, she probably would've made him blush and stammer a bit, but I'm sure in the end he would've stood by his statement. If I were in Bechdel's family, I might've gotten pretty pissed about this, though I like to imagine I'd be consoled by the incredible value of the product to which my privacy had been sacrificed.

Anyway, yeah. Not much of a review but hopefully my enthusiasm's come across. While in theory I know not everyone would love this book nearly as much as I did, I'd still unreservedly recommend it to pretty much anyone.(less)

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Sep 15, 2007 Emily rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-2007

Having never felt much inclination toward the graphic novel genre, I accepted a copy of Fun Home by Alison Bechdel on loan only because a coworker promised that I could finish it in one hour and forty minutes--almost precisely the amount of time it would take to travel from the office to my home in Connecticut, where I had plans to spend the weekend.

One hour and fifty-five minutes later, when my mom pulled in her mini-van, I was close to the end, but not there yet. I'm a slow reader. But Fun Hom...more Having never felt much inclination toward the graphic novel genre, I accepted a copy of Fun Home by Alison Bechdel on loan only because a coworker promised that I could finish it in one hour and forty minutes--almost precisely the amount of time it would take to travel from the office to my home in Connecticut, where I had plans to spend the weekend.

One hour and fifty-five minutes later, when my mom pulled in her mini-van, I was close to the end, but not there yet. I'm a slow reader. But Fun Home is also a book that demands patient, meticulous study. I examined every illustration, looking for the visual details that Alison, a cartoonist, has tucked in, here and there. Hidden like easter eggs, there are amusing details meant to be discovered on particularly grim pages. Alison can also make the most simplistic details - Road Runner on the TV; period cars; recurring appearances of the Sun Beam Bread logo - realistic, melancholy, and heartrending all at once.

And the story itself, the misery and the humor of the characters, the events, and the time period, must be thoughtfully digested. The book is divided into seven chapters, each based on a different theme in the author's childhood and young adult life. Each one on its own could be a personal essay about overcoming an unusual hardship, but the episodes are tied together by recurring moments - the scene in which Alison learns her father's deepest darkest secret over the phone; the stack of literature on homosexuality that grows and grows on her nightstand in college; her father writing letters to her mother from his bunk during the war - and references to classic literature that are carefully, artfully implemented and never daunting.

As a memoir, Fun Home is beautifully arranged and as honest and unapologetic as they come. Alison writes and draws as if she is still putting together the pieces as she does so, and closes the book with the impression that the story is not over. Which of course, it is not, since the author, her two brothers, and their mother, all survive the father they never had and then lost. Fun Home illustrates the fact that we never truly escape the legacies of our parents and never completely outgrow our childhood experiences. Alison wrote a note in the Advance Readers Edition, which I read, in which she notes: "the actual documentary truth [as recorded in diaries, letters, clippings and photographs from her childhood] was almost always richer and more surprising than the way [she] had remembered a particular event." In Fun Home, Alison does not just explore the far reaches of her memory. She revisits it as if seeing it all happen again, literally, graphically, for the first time.(less)

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Jun 14, 2009 KFed rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites, biography-autobiography

Alison Bechdel’s comic-form autobiography Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic begins and ends with strong textual and visual images of her father. The book’s first full drawing on the title page of chapter one is, in fact, a recreation of an old photograph of the enigmatic man. It sums up all that is impossible to capture about the man’s sexual and emotional being in one frame. As well, it sums up everything that makes this work artistically and thematically remarkable, an important contribution to li...more Alison Bechdel’s comic-form autobiography Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic begins and ends with strong textual and visual images of her father. The book’s first full drawing on the title page of chapter one is, in fact, a recreation of an old photograph of the enigmatic man. It sums up all that is impossible to capture about the man’s sexual and emotional being in one frame. As well, it sums up everything that makes this work artistically and thematically remarkable, an important contribution to literary treatments of emotional trauma and to American letters more generally.

In this snapshot, re-drawn and recreated with painstaking detail by the author, a young Bruce Bechdel stands shirtless and lissome in front of his home, eyes trained directly at the reader. His exact expression is difficult to read definitively. A title beneath the photo reads “Old Father, Old Artificer,” and with this, the book immediately marks its point of entry; it deliberately marks and characterizes the man around whom the next 200 pages of image and text will center. The final frame of the work is a drawing of the same man in a swimming pool, older, waiting for his daughter, a young Alison Bechdel, to leap into his arms. By the time the reader reaches this frame, the sentiment it evokes will seem almost out of place.

The two drawings taken together present both the range of Bechdel’s textual and visual project as well as the progression of her autobiographical narrative. The drawings of Bechdel’s father, framing the narrative like so, give the reader opportunity to trace a progression in narrative focus, from Bechdel’s careful consideration of her father’s secret and separate homosexual life to the consideration of the effect that this life had on the rest of his family. The book is entirely concerned with these dynamics, not least because fleshing out the life of the mysterious man on the work’s opening page is essential to understanding the life of the author herself. Fun Home is an exercise in retrospective exploration; the work engages visual and textual narratives through which the author is able to reconfigure memories of her adolescence as well as the specific moment of trauma out of which many questions of identity and selfhood for the author arose: the moment she discovered that her father committed suicide. Key to our understanding of Bechdel’s project is the notion of ‘representation’, taken to indicate something that is being re-presented, re-created, or re-rendered: a ‘re-presentation’ of the past – the people, objects and actions that are adapted into a narrative through which the author is able to ‘work through’ the trauma of her father’s death.

What I loved about this work, and what marks its importance for me, is the success of this project of re-rendering and what it says about artistic approaches to representing trauma. Underlying the basics of the work's plot are questions of genre and representation. It is as if Bechdel wants, continually, to ask: Could a novel, alone, have achieved this? Could a drawing, on its own, have represented this?

The image in which we see her facing her father’s dead body in a casket, for example, spans the width of the page but is actually split down its center as if it were two panels, and cut in half by this split is the author’s representation of herself viewing the casket and her father’s body; she is literally, in the moment that she sees her father, halved in two. The trauma of the loss of the physical presence of her father – the rupture of the ‘whole’ of his image – is, as suggested by this choice in cropping, such that she is ruptured.

This is no ordinary representation. Fun Home is thoughtful, challenging, and most of all, a pleasure to read.(less)

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Apr 27, 2008 Sara rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Folks stuck in LAX

I went out and bought this book immediately after hearing a paper on it at a recent conference. The paper had to do with narrative strategies that children use for uncovering and witnessing their parents' trauma -- in this book, the narrator Allison tries to piece together her father's life into a narrative she wants to read as that of a closeted gay man. In the narrator's logic, her coming out of the closet prompted her father's suicide four months later. After a life of secret affairs and sedu...more I went out and bought this book immediately after hearing a paper on it at a recent conference. The paper had to do with narrative strategies that children use for uncovering and witnessing their parents' trauma -- in this book, the narrator Allison tries to piece together her father's life into a narrative she wants to read as that of a closeted gay man. In the narrator's logic, her coming out of the closet prompted her father's suicide four months later. After a life of secret affairs and seduction of teenage boys, her father -- according to her narrative -- couldn't face having missed out on -- or chasing after -- the freedom that was now available to her as a post-Stonewall gay woman.

But it's not clear how much credit we are to give to this narration, and how much the point of the narrative is to expose its own tenuousness. Her father's death was ruled an accident -- he stumbled into oncoming traffic while clearing a lot. Even if the death was willed, the narrator herself provides plenty of evidence for other constructions of what could have caused the suicide. A man whose rage for order verged on Mommy Dearest, the father clearly suffered from a mood disorder, narcissism, and even a tendency to kleptomania -- none of which are endemic to homosexuality, even of the closeted sort. The man was unpleasant, clearly disturbed and distraught by his wife's recent request for a divorce.

Thus the the narrator's attempt to integrate his death into the story of her coming out is as much a story about how badly she wants to be connected to him, as it is about any objective explanation of his life and death. Every episode she recounts is layered to the point of being overburdened with symbolism -- the summer her father gets into trouble with the law for seducing a teenage boy is also the summer her mother has the lead in an Oscar Wilde play -- and also the summer Allison gets her period. And also the summer that the Watergate scandal is exposed. This surplus of symbolic baggage is further compromised by the narrator's accounts her own childhood attempts to keep a diary -- which she marked up with the annotations "I think" "I think" "I think" to ward off the dangers of claiming as objective what was only her point of view. As much as she tells us about her father, the narrator tells us even more about why we should be sceptical of what she's telling us.

And maybe what's most fascinating about her attempts to identify her homosexuality to her father's sexual life is all of the possible identifications she has to shut down to get there. Identifying with her father means she doesn't have to identify with the teenage boys he exploited, placing his desires before their autonomy. Naming her coming out of the closet as the catalyst for her father's death removes blame from her mother, whose request for divorce might otherwise provide a suicide motive. At the same time it erases the possibility that coming out of the closet prompted her mother to ask for the divorce, moved to escape a sham marriage by her own daughter's unwillingness to play along with convention. The narrator's musings that if her father had chosen in the early 80s not suicide but life as a gay man, he probably would have ended up dead of AIDS anyway acts a safety valve, a way of keeping her identification with her father from becoming too all-consuming. The father who controlled the decor of her bedroom, the clothes she wore, the books she read could just as easily have moved in and decided to inhabit and use even her homosexuality as an extension of himself if he hadn't died first. Her dependence in the last few chapters of the novel on Proust, Joyce and Collette to explain her relationship with her father seem a distancing move, so that she might understand her identification with her father as an identification with any character in a book -- intense, but not impinging in one's daily life.

The potential destruction the father could have worked on the daughter by living might be read in the baroque level of detail this graphic novel has, despite being authored and illustrated by a self-professed modern minimalist. Instead of spare lines and empty spaces Allison Bechdel fills her book with the gingerbread latticing, velvet flocked wall-paper and intricately carved bannisters of her father's pretentious Victorian tastes. (less)

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Jun 25, 2007 Jordan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: indie_comics

An exceptionally well-written piece of work that will hopefully open some doors to people unwilling to take comic art seriously.
That said, I can't help but compare it to the benchmarks of graphic novel memoirs - "Blankets," "Maus," and "Persepolis" - and it falls short. It just didn't draw me in the way I should have been. She relies too heavily on captions and telling us what happened, rather than letting her characters speak to each other and show us. She doesn't give the art room to do what i...more

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May 24, 2009 Lisa Vegan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, biography, graphic-comics, reviewed, favorites

Brilliant! (That word sums it up just fine and could have been a fine entire review.)

I’ve never been a huge comics fan. I liked Peanuts from a young age and Doonesbury and I think The Far Side is absolutely perfect, but I never read comic books when I was young. As an adult I’ve found many graphic/comic book books that I’ve enjoyed, most of them memoirs and this is another one, a unique one.

I am in awe of those who can take their pain & grief & the unfinished business in their personal h...more Brilliant! (That word sums it up just fine and could have been a fine entire review.)

I’ve never been a huge comics fan. I liked Peanuts from a young age and Doonesbury and I think The Far Side is absolutely perfect, but I never read comic books when I was young. As an adult I’ve found many graphic/comic book books that I’ve enjoyed, most of them memoirs and this is another one, a unique one.

I am in awe of those who can take their pain & grief & the unfinished business in their personal history and experience and create something so amazing from it.

The book is subversively hilarious and poignant. It brought me to both laughter and tears, mostly laughter.

I thought it would be a memoir about a woman and her relationship with her father, but it turned out to be so much more than that; it constantly surprised me.

The author comes from an academic family and there’s many references to other literature and literary places and I really enjoyed that.

Like the author, I too poured over my mother’s copy of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care. I guess you could say it was my first psychology book.

The art and writing and communicating are all splendid, the latter being a particularly impressive accomplishment given the author’s family of origin’s difficulty with communication.

I called a friend when I was 2/3 through to tell her she had to read it, to make an exception from the audio books she’s been reading for over a year. She’s the one who introduced me to the Maus books and I know that she’d absolutely love this.

If you’re a reader who gets bothered by sexual content, perhaps you shouldn’t read this, but otherwise definitely read it. It’s an extremely fast read (although you will want to look closely at every frame) and a fascinating and profound book. It’s a terrific coming of age memoir. I also enjoyed the history and pop culture references. The author is seven years younger than I am but her reminiscences brought back memories for me too.

I think this book might be the one that inspires me to make a new shelf for those books that don’t quite earn a place on my favorites shelf but come close. I might have to add/change favorites shelves to include more books; I can think of a few other books besides this one that could fit there.
(less)

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Jul 04, 2012 Sue rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites, graphic, memoir

10 stars! No 20! No 1000! Not only does Alison Bechdel tell her own very personal story, she tells a larger lesbian coming out story, an even larger coming of age story; heck she tells MY story in some stunningly coincidental specifics.

Bechdel and I are approximately the same age. We met once when she lived in Minneapolis, at a book event, (I think)<---Fun Home reference. It was a book signing, possibly in the upstairs of the Minneapolis' most famous and recognizable gay bar: The Gay 90's. S...more

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Dec 28, 2012 Matt rated it 5 of 5 stars

Sad, compelling, and strange. I'm a fan of comics-- graphic novels, of course, or in this case a graphic memoir. Even though I can't find many parallels between Bechdel's family life and my own, I was still struck by how much I felt for her. My own father is the opposite of Bechdel's-- large, gentle, content, and masculine-- but I could see shadows of Bechdel's relationship with her father in my own more recent history. The places that self loathing can take a person are truly terrible, as are t...more

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Sep 27, 2011 Kaion rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: graphic-novel, memoir, unfinshed

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is Alison Bechdel's (of Bechdel test) memoir about growing in a cold home where all the occupants isolated themselves in artistic pursuit, with particular focus on her relationship with her closeted father, who killed himself soon after she came out as a lesbian in college. I don't write about the graphic novels/series I read often because I generally feel unable to talk about their impact without more knowledge of their nuts and bolts. I've been reading more review...more Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is Alison Bechdel's (of Bechdel test) memoir about growing in a cold home where all the occupants isolated themselves in artistic pursuit, with particular focus on her relationship with her closeted father, who killed himself soon after she came out as a lesbian in college. I don't write about the graphic novels/series I read often because I generally feel unable to talk about their impact without more knowledge of their nuts and bolts. I've been reading more reviews of graphic works to hopefully remedy that, but it still leaves me somewhat short to describe the shortcomings of Fun Home, but I'll try:

For one, the writing of Fun Home is extremely labored, consisting of endless confused comparisons to literature that waffle on and about for a few pages at a time before being abandoned for other thin comparisons. I don't object to allusions in general, but Bechdel isn't using them to build a message (rather than obscuring it under attempts at erudition). In fact, as the narrative has fits and stops and weaves and jumps (in chronology and topic) rather haphazardly, it most frequently seems even Bechdel herself hasn't a clue where she's going with this.

For the other, the art of Fun Home is drab and uninteresting. It's serviceable, certainly; I never mistake people's hands for kitchen implements. But her character designs are not particular distinctive, most frustratingly there are not really any drawn that identify Alison herself at her various depicted ages. Her use of paneling and pacing is monotonous and unimaginative, same thirds layout appears again and again (three horizontal panels, divided by text, the middle panel further divided vertically into two pictures). She uses almost exclusively only a flat middle-light grey tone out of the whole range of greyscale (nor does she add any texture via hatching or detail work) & she doesn't use white or black space at all, creating a piece that conveys no mood or atmosphere.

Singularly, the writing and the art are probably mostly dull, but combined, they make a potent combination of bad. There's almost no interplay between the two (see how dialogue work is extremely limited, and when it does appear, is totally superfluous). They work at cross purposes: text boxes of elaborately overworked SAT-bonus narration crowd out crude bland drawings. It's a clashing glaring mismatch that only increases the confusion of confused work, the biggest confusion being why it's in the format of a graphic novel at all. Rating: 1 star(less)

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Megan Excellent review! I completely agree with you. I think it would've been much better had it been written as a novella or some other format. That way sh...more
Oct 04, 2011 08:48am

Kaion Thanks. I was really surprised by how poorly it was written after all the effusive praise I've heard for it. It's like all the literature references i...more
Oct 04, 2011 06:39pm

Chloe I've said the same on another review piece for the same book, but I'm glad to see this review. Most of what I've seen is endless praise, which is a sh...more
May 19, 2013 10:27am

Jul 24, 2010 Jimmy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recommended to Jimmy by: orianna

Shelves: female, graphic-based, non-fiction, poetic-essay, and-a-half-stars, year-2000s

The 7 chapters in this graphic memoir feel less like she's telling you a story from beginning to end... and more like she's telling you the same story 7 times. But each time, she reveals a little bit more, either contextual, historical, or personal analysis. It's more of a graphic-personal-essay than a graphic-memoir, in that she is trying to work something out, trying to make some meaning out of her past by looking at it from several different angles. The point is not to tell a good story, the...more The 7 chapters in this graphic memoir feel less like she's telling you a story from beginning to end... and more like she's telling you the same story 7 times. But each time, she reveals a little bit more, either contextual, historical, or personal analysis. It's more of a graphic-personal-essay than a graphic-memoir, in that she is trying to work something out, trying to make some meaning out of her past by looking at it from several different angles. The point is not to tell a good story, the point is to wring some ounce of meaning out of it, and if she didn't do it so well, I would fault her for this. But she does it well, and it suits her OCD personality to hash and re-hash things, to build some kind of sense and meaning (even numbers except for multiples of 13!) out of what is seemingly meaningless.

One way she does this is to cast her family in the roles of literary characters, writers, and actors. Through the course of this book she draws parallels between herself/her family and the following: F Scott Fitzgerald, Oscar Wilde, Ulysses/The Odyssey, Icarus/Daedelus, Richard Nixon, The Adams Family, Jimmy Stewart & Family in It's A Wonderful Life, Camus, Catcher in the Rye, Colette, Proust, Robert Redford, some Henry James novel etc. etc. By the end you feel like she's probably way too smart for her own good. All this analogizing her life can't be good for her, this obsessive analysis borders on neurosis, and she knows it too: one of her many theories is that it is easier to live through fiction, or to access life through illusion/allusion than directly.

Anyway, the weaving of these threads together is done with such skill that it makes for a good read. And perhaps she did come away with it, after all of that, with some kind of insight. It definitely feels like insight by the end, but I'm not sure if it is, or if all it boils down to is just her trying to convince herself of what she wants to believe.

I was struck by the fact that I didn't like the father at all. And I felt like there weren't that many characters to really cling to in this book, except for the father and the narrator. But other than the father, the other characters fall back into bit parts, almost invisibly. And I wasn't sure if I was supposed to feel sympathy for the father, which is what seemed to be happening towards the end. I felt sympathy maybe for his situation, but I really didn't like him as a person (well, that sounds kinda weird... how about "as a person as portrayed in this book").

One last note: I wasn't really impressed by the art when I began, but it grew on me (mainly because of the story). She's definitely a much better thinker/writer than an artist. And the way she weaves the words with the pictures works really well sometimes without seeming too clever or innovative (which usually gets on my nerves).(less)

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Nov 24, 2008 Dusty Myers rated it 4 of 5 stars

I had some mixed reactions to the this book, a memoir of growing up with a closeted father. I thought at times she pushed so hard to connect the goings on in her life to some kind of historical or literary context. Her father was very Proustian, it seems, and her family's life was straight out of In Search of Lost Time, and also some James novels, and Gatsby. But throughout, Bechdel is critical of her need to make these connections. I mean, she's aware of what she's doing, and treats it, in her...more I had some mixed reactions to the this book, a memoir of growing up with a closeted father. I thought at times she pushed so hard to connect the goings on in her life to some kind of historical or literary context. Her father was very Proustian, it seems, and her family's life was straight out of In Search of Lost Time, and also some James novels, and Gatsby. But throughout, Bechdel is critical of her need to make these connections. I mean, she's aware of what she's doing, and treats it, in her self-conscious narration, as some kind of tic she can't help. This assuages the obvious manipulation of experience she's got going on.

And then toward the end there's this great moment with Ulysses, which she reads in a winter-term course because it is her father's favorite, and yet slacks behind in class because she has better, more vital reading to do. Which is to say: books by and about lesbians. (Bechdel came out in college.) So I thought this was going to be some inevitable refutation of, like, the patriarchal, "big books" canon that her father somewhat forced on her, but no.

I think I only want to read memoirs in comics form, in the future. The great thing about the form is how economical it is with time. So many pages have panels next to one another that move from Alison as a toddler to Alison as a teen, then back to toddlerhood and then all the up to her near-present self. These sorts of moves would be either incomprehensible, in a written memoir, or so glacially slow and dull if the writer made sure we were following her jumps in time. This way, the comic can work a lot like how our memory works, which is so rarely chronological.

For a while I thought Bechdel's paneling and general structure was really straightforward, not really pushing the form anywhere, until I got to the "climax" of the book (or maybe it is the climax) on pages 220-221. To avoid ruining the "plot" of it, what has been throughout the book a pretty loose and varied style of paneling becomes on these pages this lock-step grid where every image is the same. Just the dialogue changes. It's not only a great mirror to what's going on in that cramped little space of her father's car, but it also works, like I said, as a visual climax, some kind of epiphanic inevitability.

I like it when comic books let their art signal narrative shifts, I guess is what I'm saying.(less)

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Jan 17, 2013 Kerene rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I don't generally enjoy graphic docu-dramas, but after reading the sequel to Fun House (Are You My Mother?) and loving it, I had to find out whether its predecessor held the same value. This book didn't hit home as much for me. This may be because I am not as much of a literary academic so I couldn't wholeheartedly embrace her analogies. I didn't have a problem with this in Are You My Mother? because I love psychology. The book's themes felt universal, and if I didn't understand something, I was...more

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Aug 12, 2008 Trin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: booksaboutbooks, biography, graphicnovel, queerlit, american-lit

Really fantastic graphic novel about Bechdel dealing with her father’s (possible) suicide, learning that he spent most of his life in the closet, and discovering and embracing her own sexuality. There’s a lot that’s great about this book, but I think my favorite thing was the way Bechdel used literature—her father was an English teacher and a big reader—to illustrate aspects of her story. She draws parallels between works such as Ulysses, The Remembrance of Things Past, and The Great Gatsby a...more

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Nov 17, 2011 Monica! rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: winning-is-for-winners, the-most-respectable-form-of-lying, what-is-this-feeling, read-in-2011, whee-pictures, no-dragons-so-it-must-be-true, paul-is-definitely-gay

I'm not entirely sure how to review this book, which tells the story of the author's childhood, her relationship with her (closeted gay and eventually suicidal) father, and her own sexuality. It really gives the impression you're reading a diary, interspersed as it is with realistic photo illustrations, letters, and journal entries, and as a result... how do you review someone's diary?

But it's brilliant for sure, filled with uncomfortable silences and family secrets and Ulysses and one-eyed gir...more

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May 05, 2010 Meg Powers rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: comics, wickedqueer, readin2010

Reading Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic put me in the same irritated and impatient mood experienced when reading Toni Morrison's The Song of Solomon in high school: both books feel like major wank-offs to the writers' cumulative reading endeavors. To put it in less crude terms, both books overflow with self-conscious references to classic literature (both use The Odyssey in a major way). However, this is not a review of The Song of Solomon, so I suppose I will set aside that grudge for now.

This is...more

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Mar 31, 2009 Emilia P rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: comic-books

You know, I thought this book couldn't possibly be as good as I remembered it. But it really really is. It is exquisitely paced and laid out and drawn and balances Bechdel's story with her father's very well. And yes, it is maybe a little snobbily literary (Camus, Proust, Anais Nin, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Wilde off the top of my head) but it is essential to the nature of the characters.

So two of the basic themes are important ones. First: family and memory. She makes it clear th...more You know, I thought this book couldn't possibly be as good as I remembered it. But it really really is. It is exquisitely paced and laid out and drawn and balances Bechdel's story with her father's very well. And yes, it is maybe a little snobbily literary (Camus, Proust, Anais Nin, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Wilde off the top of my head) but it is essential to the nature of the characters.

So two of the basic themes are important ones. First: family and memory. She makes it clear that her dad was intolerable a lot of the time, but also that there was a lot of good in him and you couldn't really take one without the other. She doesn't absolve him or condemn him and it is such a fine line that I think she walks it really well.
Fun Home is both critical of and sentimental about parents with obvious flaws and great passions. Which is perfect - because that's pretty much how life is.

Second: Sexuality and self-discovery, I think? She's a little bit less expertly ambivalent on this, but that's ok. Her coming-out process is a literary one, and that's cool. The responses of her parents to her coming out is fascinating -- it is nice that she shows her mom's response:- "my life is tied firmly at this time to family and work, and I see your choice as a threat to both of these." Her mom got a pretty raw deal, and I am glad we get some of her story.

Addendum: On further reflection, I think she (unintentionally, maybe} expresses the initial sense of bravery/idealism of people who act on their gay leanings, and how, ultimately, that life is not going to be all roses and sunshine, making that choice is not a panacea. It is all tied up in the rest of your life, and your family even, no matter what you'd like to think. That's what this book says to me. But probably not to everybody.

The literary courtship of her parents is quite nice, and all the typewritten letters between their family make me miss my typewriter alot. But yep, I think it's a must-read for anyone who has ever had parents or had a sexuality or liked books. There you go.(less)

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Aug 31, 2011 Seth Hahne rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: comics

For some reason, and it may be a reaction based upon my own opposing predilection, attempts at overachievement bother me. When a person tries to act beyond the envelope of their abilities, I become put off. At least, I do when I notice. When an artist tries to create something amazing and succeeds without hiccough, I am wholly unperturbed—this due the nature of success. A clean success betrays no hint that the accomplishment was any kind of a stretch, no evidence that the achievement was anythin...more

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Dec 21, 2007 Earline rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: avoid-like-the-plague, comics, non-fiction, memoirs, snobby, overrated

just insert "Fun Home" in place of "House of Leaves" in Mickey's review:

This book looks at you with this smug fucking smile on it's face, daring you to say that you don't like it, knowing that masses of people are going to go along with it because they don't want to look stupid. That's what this is. It's the fucking Radiohead of books. Well, House of Leaves, I am not stupid and I'm calling your bullshit. Fuck you

14 likes · like · see review

Apr 06, 2012 Maureen rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012

i'd say this is a 3.5. i liked the idea of calling a funeral home a "fun home" a whole lot. this is a memoir in comic book form, alison bechdel telling her own story in parallel with her father's and how she moved on after he died. i should say this is a family book, and so not normally the kind of book i read, but i got it at a dork book exchange a couple of years ago, and i needed something with art in it, so i picked this up, and here we are. bechdel's art presented in minimal black and white...more

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Apr 18, 2007 Amanda rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Meh. It was very self-indulgent (although i suppose most memoirs are)...also it was unexpectedly heavy on the literary references, and i didn't get a lot of them. But the illustrations weren't bad.

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May 25, 2010 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’ is a difficult read for many reasons. The subject matter is immediately controversial: a gay woman trying to come to terms with the death of her father having recently discovered that he had hidden his own homosexuality his whole life.
Bechdel often uses the comparison of Icarus and Daedalus to illustrate the complexities and near madness of a man obsessed with perfection and full of idiosyncratic compulsions; honing his invention and intelligence while at the same tim...more Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’ is a difficult read for many reasons. The subject matter is immediately controversial: a gay woman trying to come to terms with the death of her father having recently discovered that he had hidden his own homosexuality his whole life.
Bechdel often uses the comparison of Icarus and Daedalus to illustrate the complexities and near madness of a man obsessed with perfection and full of idiosyncratic compulsions; honing his invention and intelligence while at the same time afraid of approaching his own sun (truth) for fear of melting his wings, hiding in his maze of excuses and fears and becoming his own minotaur.

It is when Bechdel finally gathers up enough courage to tell her mother that she is gay that her mother reveals the details of her father’s affairs with other men and pursuit and seduction of seventeen year old boys. At the time Bechdel comments that she anticipated her coming out would make her more independent but instead it had the effect of returning her back into her parents orbit.

Another question that Bechdel returns to frequently is whether or not her father’s death was an accident or suicide. It is this state of uncertainty where Bechdel antagonises herself over whether her own coming out may have prompted him to take his own life. In this case it made me wonder whether if in fact Bechdel herself was drawing her father back to her own orbit, as if she still had not fully acknowledged his own independent life.
As children we want our parents to be perfect and when we first begin to realise that this is not the case it is the beginning of our own passage towards adulthood bringing with it the insecurities and experiences that will shape us and our view of the world.
If we can traverse our parent’s failings, accept their flaws and mistakes we have a better chance of being emotionally healthy and open minded individuals ourselves but, obviously, some parents are more flawed than others and some children will carry more baggage into adulthood.

‘Fun Home’ is a complex and blackly humorous book, full of literary allusion and references (Bechdel thankfully espouses the not common enough knowledge that if a person wants to say they have read ‘Ulysses’ they really ought to have a firm grasp of the Greek poets first.), mundane and fondly remembered detail about growing up in the 70’s and a painfully honest account of a personal journey to discover a bond with a flawed parent that she had initially feared might not be there at all.
Recommended.

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Nov 25, 2008 Hilda rated it 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this a lot. The stuff about Proust, Joyce, Collette, etc etc triangulates the narration with the remembered events (and the reader) the same way that cultural artifacts triangulate the relationships in the family, and also revenge the author upon the disliked habits of literary reading she remembers, not only from her charming but narcissistic parents but from her English classes at Oberlin. However, they take up a lot of room, and honestly for some of it I'd have rather heard about so...more

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Jun 28, 2012 Chuck O'Connor rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: graphic-novels

I wish I could give +++ to the star rating here at Goodreads. This book is wonderful. The honest voice revealed through a combination of illustration, poetic reality and autobiography is incredible.

I began my love for reading when I traded a milky-way candy bar with my brother for an issue of a DC comics horror title. My primary love growing up was reading comic-books where I could lose time in the meditative practice of issue upon issue of a super-hero title.

The comic-book form of this work c...more

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May 08, 2012 marg rated it 5 of 5 stars

Well this has been a most fascinating and unsettling experience. I remember when FH came out, how the Times loved it, how I kept meaning to read it even though graphic novels are really not my thing. My memory sort of stops there. Recently I came upon it at the library - or rather I read about Bechdel in the New Yorker and reserved it - and I took it home and began to read and thought, wow this is awesome - five stars! When I typed the title into GR to post it as my current read, there I found a...more Well this has been a most fascinating and unsettling experience. I remember when FH came out, how the Times loved it, how I kept meaning to read it even though graphic novels are really not my thing. My memory sort of stops there. Recently I came upon it at the library - or rather I read about Bechdel in the New Yorker and reserved it - and I took it home and began to read and thought, wow this is awesome - five stars! When I typed the title into GR to post it as my current read, there I found a two star, negative review - of MINE - from three years ago. Strange.
I guess I didn't get very far, and that I found the constant moving of my eyeballs to this way and that sort of distracting, or something. All I know is I did a 180 this time around which has me sort of humbled - can I really trust my own opinions, or do we all shift and change and (hopefully) grow in our reading tastes, even in as few as three years? It also makes me think about the books I was so quick to discard - maybe were I to give them a fair shake I would find that I actually really enjoyed them.
Anyway, this time around I found this book to be basically flawless. It is insightful, heartbreakingly honest, beautifully written and beautifully illustrated, and yes the two do go together in a most compelling way. Rarely have I read a memoir that actually has a point, a plot, and a heroine that you admire and like so very much. This was not a narcissistic romp through someone's past, and all of their inflated memories. This was a story of self exploration and discovery, and all of the complications involved. Love love loved it. Glad I gave it another shot.

2009 review; 2 stars:
Tragic, yes ... but comic?
This graphic novel (and I do mean graphic) started out well but quickly unraveled for me - it is disjointed such that there is no chronological order and each chapter sort of appears without there being a sense of purpose. Alison weaves ideas and events that I have no interest in reading let alone seeing drawn, and I can't at all understand how the pictures contribute to the novel.
At times I thought this was well written, but is it well written because she uses a lot of big words and literary references? Because as I neared the end (I can't stomach finishing the whole thing) that was all this had come down to. After all the hype this was a pretty big bummer.(less)

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Oct 31, 2008 Berenice rated it 4 of 5 stars

Fun home is a book by Alison Bechdel. This book is actually a graphic memoir of Alison’s life. This book involved her going through a lot of phases from when she was a child all the way into her college years. One of those is when she dresses like a boy. Then as she grows up and goes to college she admits that she is lesbian. Her father’s death was a constant reminder of who she was and how that affected her in her life even before he died and after her father was no longer with her. Even though...more Fun home is a book by Alison Bechdel. This book is actually a graphic memoir of Alison’s life. This book involved her going through a lot of phases from when she was a child all the way into her college years. One of those is when she dresses like a boy. Then as she grows up and goes to college she admits that she is lesbian. Her father’s death was a constant reminder of who she was and how that affected her in her life even before he died and after her father was no longer with her. Even though he died when she was nearly 20 she said it felt as if her father was always gone. They had a very complex relationship. These two characters were not your typical father and daughter. They had a mask on for a long period in there in their lives. For example Alison’s mother had kept her household together for more than 20 years as a normal average family when in fact she knew her husband was gay. He never came out of the closet but he spoke to Alison about it when they went to the movies one day went she was in college. Her father’s death was something that Alison will never forget, she dealt with it differently then they way most people grief for their family members who have passed away. She actually didn’t cry. She was laughing when someone asked her how her summer was going and she just answered “okay. I’m working in the library. Oh, and my father died” [227]. She said her family was apart, very distant from one another. They all had their own thing they were doing only that they lived under the same household, which was the only uniting fact. Even though throughout the book she says her father was very distant from her she admitted that he was always there to catch her when she need him. They were the very close because of their sexuality.
This book I personally thought was really great. It had a lot of issues and a lot of people can really relate it. It dealt with homosexuality, growing up, family and other themes. This book is great and amazingly written because of the fact that it’s not your typical memoir. It was written in comic strip form. I found it really interesting because I think the reason why she chooses to write it in this form was because it was the only way she truly show her readers what she meant in some cases. With the drawings I don’t think she had to do as much explaining as she would have if she wrote the book in a different style of writing. Her drawings spoke for themselves which I thought was an amazing way to transmit to readers. I think others should read it because it’s really interesting to see the way Alison write about her life and the connection she has with her father, and mother. It’s also interesting to see her change from a young child into young women. She goes from being a child with very compulsive behaviors to a lesbian woman who likes to fight for her rights. Many people will get a lot out of this book, it’s very interesting to read and it had some good vocabulary.
All kinds of people would enjoy reading this book. I think those especially into comic books and even those who aren’t like myself. I think if you like books about family and about many different themes you will enjoy this book. This book is very enjoyable I think anyone will get attached to this book if they like seeing the action of it all happening. The appealing thing about this book is that you get a better understanding because you don’t have to picture it all happening in your head you just have to comprehend it and follow along.I encourage all to read it!
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Dec 17, 2008 Aerin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: graphic-novel, memoir, americana

I very rarely read "graphic novels" (that term still screams "euphemism for comic book!" to me, so I feel obliged to put it in quotes). I think I've only ever read this one and Persepolis, and although I enjoyed both of them immensely, I'd still feel a little weird seeking other ones out. There's something that feels so deviant, so guilty-pleasureish about reading a book full of pictures. Like it's cheating. Like it's not a real book.

Nonetheless, Fun Home was incredibly good, and very moving....more

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Oct 13, 2008 Lizzie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: comics, nonfiction, memoir, must-reread

Chris bought this last year and when we were moving he put it in the to-Strand pile, from which I rescued it. Amy loves this book! I said. You can't sell books Amy loves til I read them!

It was an interesting way to read it, doing the detective work the whole time of why Amy loves this book and Chris disliked this book. I thought it was very nice. In the memoir comic genre, it's a smart one. I liked the thoughtful threads of symbolism and memory. Those are good ingredients in stories.

Early on, I...more

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Aug 20, 2008 Erik rated it 5 of 5 stars

Bechdel’s underground hit Dykes to Watch Out For has always been floating somewhere on my peripheral vision when it comes to comics – much like gay comic strip artist Howard Cruise’s Wendel strip. So it was with great surprise and relish that I picked up this 2007 Eisner-winning graphic novel of hers. Not unlike Cruise’s quasi-autobiographical literary graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby, Bechdel takes Fun Home far beyond her usual comic strip format by composing a multi-layered memoir that is best...more Bechdel’s underground hit Dykes to Watch Out For has always been floating somewhere on my peripheral vision when it comes to comics – much like gay comic strip artist Howard Cruise’s Wendel strip. So it was with great surprise and relish that I picked up this 2007 Eisner-winning graphic novel of hers. Not unlike Cruise’s quasi-autobiographical literary graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby, Bechdel takes Fun Home far beyond her usual comic strip format by composing a multi-layered memoir that is best read and savored on many levels.

On the surface, this is a story about how Bechdel learned of her late father’s homosexuality just after she came out to her parents while in college, and right before he passed away from a vehicular accident. Yet underneath, she draws parallels to James Joyce – one of her father’s favorite novelists – and the themes of finding one’s identity in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Throughout her narrative, she also weaves into her graphic narrative the themes of the son finding the father (or, in Bechdel’s case, the daughter finding the father), the myth of Dedalus and Icarus (the scaffold for Portrait), the life and death of Albert Camus, as well as an ounce or two of Proustian reverie a la A Rembrance of Things Past (for good aesthetic measure, not to mention a chapter title). But Bechdel doesn’t just stop there in her literary meanderings.

Towards the end, her relationship with her father mirrors that of Stephan Dedalus and Leon Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses (a quasi-sequel to Portrait) – which in turn mirrors that of Telemachus and Ulysses. Three texts and two myths brilliantly resonate between one another. And if I may be so bold, her narrative technique closely mirrors that of the story-within-a-story technique employed by Homer in The Odyssey. (Clever that Ms. Bechdel!)

No surprise, Bechdel won a 2007 Eisner for Best Reality-Based Work because of her narrative and artistic brilliance on Fun Home. And what project she turns to next I will most definitely keep an eye on.
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