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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Alison Bechdel

4.06 · Rating details · 143,013 ratings · 9,698 reviews

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 a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fierc ...more

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Hardcover, 240 pages

Published June 8th 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Company

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Jun 18, 2010 Paul Bryant rated it liked it

Shelves: autobiography-memoir, 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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May 05, 2010 Meg Powers rated it it was ok

Shelves: comics, homozone, 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 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 how I feel: any person, no matter how mediocre his/her life might be perceived, can be made into a great story. The key to this is good writing, and although Bechdel's writing is ORNAMENTAL, it's not engaging. She doesn't make me care about her, and I care only a little bit about her dad, whom the book focuses on. The constant literary references (Joyce, Camus, Proust, Wilde, etc) do not impress me and they do not enrich the story she is telling. Bechdel continuously draws parallels to anything and everything literary. Comparing the map in The Wind in the Willows to a map of her local terrain is one thing: comparing her first act of performing cunnilingus to entering Homer's cave of Polyphemus made me groan out loud. Bechdel also uses dictionary definitions as an ongoing motif, a cliche that ALWAYS annoys me ("'orgasm: or-gaz-um-' "what is an orgasm? what does it mean in the context of my own life? Let's examine this word and blah blah blah blah" <---bitchy paraphrasing).

I will say I have never been a fan of Dykes to Watch Out For or Alison Bechdel's drawing style in general (and my enjoyment of a comic, as is typical, is largely derived from the visual component) , so it is unfair to complain about that here;it's a matter of taste. However, if the facial expressions were rendered differently, and if Bechdel shook out the masturbatory references and word definitions, she might have sold me.

But no.

edit*** I think I'm mature enough to revisit Song of Solomon with less of a chip on my shoulder. In terms of Fun Home, I re-read it almost ten years after writing this review, hoping I would feel differently, but I don't. I've grown to appreciate Bechdel a lot, but I think she is much more successful hiding her autobiography within the fictional Dykes to Watch Out For characters. When she addresses us directly, I think she gets bogged down by self consciousness. ...more

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Sep 15, 2007 Emily rated it really liked it

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 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. ...more

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Jan 03, 2014 Patrick rated it it was amazing

I've known about Bechdel for some time, but I've never gotten around to reading any of her work.

Odds are, you know about her too, even if you're not aware of it. She's the one that invented the appropriately-named Bechdel Test for movies.

If you don't know about the test, it bears talking about. It's almost like a checklist:

1. Does the movie have two female characters in it?

2. Do the two female characters have at least one conversation?

3. Does at least one of their conversations concentrate o ...more

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Oct 25, 2016 Fabian rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, top-100

Works doubly as one hugely terrific autobiography & a megaengaging graphic novel. In FUN HOME, there is a tremendous longing to merge both of these Arts. The intent is always to make print as compelling as the pictorials they are made to convey. Astute, cheeky & enthralling, it brings together disparate themes like 'Wind in the Willows" & "The Importance of Being Earnest" and "Catcher in the Rye", as well as A Chorus Line & Joyce's Ulysses: pretty much a choose-your-own-literature type adventure ...more

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Jul 11, 2017 Larry H rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Family dysfunction, bow down to the Bechdel family.

Alison Bechdel's father Bruce was an enigma to her while she was growing up—an English teacher and director of the family-owned funeral home (aka the "Fun Home") who had an exacting eye for fashion, decor, and gardening. He wasn't a bad father, but he always seemed to keep her and her brothers at arm's length, not to mention her mother.

While Alison remembered some special, tender times, she remembered more moments of being forced to wear an outf Family dysfunction, bow down to the Bechdel family.

Alison Bechdel's father Bruce was an enigma to her while she was growing up—an English teacher and director of the family-owned funeral home (aka the "Fun Home") who had an exacting eye for fashion, decor, and gardening. He wasn't a bad father, but he always seemed to keep her and her brothers at arm's length, not to mention her mother.

While Alison remembered some special, tender times, she remembered more moments of being forced to wear an outfit she didn't want, scolded into meeting his tough cleaning standards, and feeling bewildered at his obsession with making sure all of the flowers around their house always looked perfect.

When Alison was in college, she came out to her parents as a lesbian. Shortly thereafter, she found out that her father was gay. While perhaps not entirely surprising if she added up all of the signs and clues she might have noted subconsciously, the discovery still throws her for a loop. And while they had one half-conversation about this, a few weeks after his revelation, her father died, leaving a legacy of mystery and confusion in his wake.

"Perhaps my eagerness to claim him as 'gay' in the way I am 'gay,' as opposed to bisexual or some other category, is just a way of keeping him to myself—a sort of inverted oedipal complex."

Fun Home is both a daughter's efforts to make sense of her father's life and death as it is an account of growing up uncomfortable in your own skin, of knowing you are different but being afraid of acknowledging it for fear everything might change, even though it should. It's a story of coming to terms with who you are, while remembering a man who really never had that luxury.

I'm really late to the party in reading this, and while I've heard some of the music from the musical version of Fun Home , I never saw the show either. I've never read a graphic novel/memoir before (although I read lots of Archie, Betty, and Veronica comics growing up, and was addicted to the Silver Surfer), and this was both a refreshing and challenging format for me.

This book practically pulsates with emotion, anger, and confusion, as well as the uncertainty that comes with self-discovery. When it dealt with Alison's own life or her father's struggles to find himself, the book is strongest, but it spends a lot of time holding up their story against a backdrop of classic literature (which her father so loved), and after a while I didn't enjoy those portions as much. However, as someone who wishes his father was still alive so we could have conversations about life there never seemed to be time for then, I found Fun Home beautifully moving.

If you mostly read books via Kindle or another e-reader, do yourself a favor and borrow or buy the printed version of this one. I was so glad I made the investment to enjoy the power of how Bechdel's illustrations told as much of the story as her words. While this wasn't perhaps as good as I had expected it to be, it still is powerful, and I'll remember it for some time to come.

See all of my reviews at http://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blo.... ...more

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Jun 23, 2017 Elyse Walters rated it it was amazing

Shelves: biography-autobiography-memoir, graphic-comic, non-fiction, lgbt-themes

Many Thanks to Margaret who recommended this book to me!

WOW! ....I knew NOTHING about this book -TERRIFIC/ SPECTACULAR-until it was in my hands today......(other than it was a highly recognized-graphic memoir - chosen best book of the year by at least 10 major publications in 2006).

80, 4333 people rated this book -- so where was I? Hidden away with blindfolds and earplugs?

There's a lot going on in this --'memoir'.... so much so, there could be several individual books written on any 'one' theme Many Thanks to Margaret who recommended this book to me!

WOW! ....I knew NOTHING about this book -TERRIFIC/ SPECTACULAR-until it was in my hands today......(other than it was a highly recognized-graphic memoir - chosen best book of the year by at least 10 major publications in 2006).

80, 4333 people rated this book -- so where was I? Hidden away with blindfolds and earplugs?

There's a lot going on in this --'memoir'.... so much so, there could be several individual books written on any 'one' theme.

---For 18 years Allison grew up in a house of daily renovation. If anybody has lived through having their bathroom or kitchen remodeled--you know personally what the disruption feels like. Can you imagine your entire childhood around hammers and nails..... strips of loose molding? Remodeling is very stressful. I would think that many years of focus of renovation would drive every family member into a corner. That much daily physical chaos creates disconnected communications.
---I could understand that when Allison was little, her house, the walls, the wallpaper, the furniture, the curtains, all felt like another child in the house.
She, on the other hand, often felt like the furniture.

Allison offers elegant prose - pleasure - intelligence- and compassion-- through literary references....reflecting on classics read that both she and her dad enjoyed ( shared loved for books) .

They- she and her dad- never did come 'out' to each other. Both are gay. To get the 'full' story: READ THIS GRAPHIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY!!!

Suggestion: If you have not read this book, know 'nothing' about it......(having not read 'any' reviews- no blurbs- 'nothing'- have been living under a rock like I have ), if you are willing to 'trust'..... go in blind... DON'T read anything about this book until you have finished the last page ..... I HIGHLY RECOMMENDED reading it this way.
It's Sooooooo worth reading!!!!!!!

Another TOP- TOP - TOP graphic memoir!!!!!!

A few great quotes inspired by "Ulysses", by James Joyce. ...more

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Jan 08, 2017 Nat rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, memoir, graphic-novels, diverse-reads

This graphic memoir has been on my to read list for what feels like ages, so I felt entirely satisfied when I completed reading it.

In this graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father.

Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the Fun Home. It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A f ...more

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Sep 21, 2014 Samadrita rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommended to Samadrita by: Ted

Shelves: gen-non-fiction-essays-critique, manga-comics-graphic-novels, autobiographical-biography-memoir, cherished, semi-favorites, by-women-who-matter, humour-of-the-dignified-kind, in-by-about-america, lgbt, gender-studies-sexuality

3.5/5

Fun Home's biggest flaw is its self-conscious, droll narrative voice that diminishes its raw earnestness at times. Alison Bechdel imposes her obsessive-compulsive desire for extracting meaning from even the most commonplace of occurrences on to a narrative of coming to terms with personal loss. And this whole exercize of drawing parallels between fictional and real life tragedies and pivotal emotional beats becomes too trite all too soon. Maybe she should have known when to put the kibosh o 3.5/5

Fun Home's biggest flaw is its self-conscious, droll narrative voice that diminishes its raw earnestness at times. Alison Bechdel imposes her obsessive-compulsive desire for extracting meaning from even the most commonplace of occurrences on to a narrative of coming to terms with personal loss. And this whole exercize of drawing parallels between fictional and real life tragedies and pivotal emotional beats becomes too trite all too soon. Maybe she should have known when to put the kibosh on this thing.

But it's okay. Since I understand wherefrom this monomaniacal urge originates. It's hard to make sense of a father's death especially at an age when you were only just learning how to peel off layers of pretensions obfuscating the unadulterated reality that lay at the core of his personhood. It's not so much a crushing sadness that hits you but an overwhelming disbelief and a sense of 'it's not fair' which becomes so large and potent a force that it pushes out all concomitant emotions of bereavement from your mind leaving a kind of vacuum.

Before my to psychobabble gets the better of my good sense, let me come clean about my personal reasons for rating this work as high as 3.5 stars. Greater than the sum of my annoyance at Bechdel's rather shabby artwork (at times I couldn't tell the difference between Bruce Bechdel and Alison's brothers) and her tendency to forge correlations between Proust, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Colette, Henry James, Wilde's fictional characters and snippets of memorable moments from her dysfunctional childhood spent in a rural Pennsylvania homestead, was my genuine appreciation for this heartfelt tribute to such a delightfully ambiguous father. Having lost a father at 14, I know how it feels trying to grasp at straws, trying to analyze one seemingly inconsequential incident or subjecting one precious shared moment to intense and concentrated scrutiny from all possible angles. Stray notes tucked in between the last page and the backcover of a magazine recovered years later, journals, hand-written letters, favorite paperbacks, the only bit of literary criticism he published, heaps of carefully organized notes that he prepared for his classes, tapes containing his voice recordings cooing at your tiny baby form and anecdotes recounted by the ones who knew him better and longer than you did become coded roadsigns to some secret location promising complete de-mystification. But you know it's just delusional thinking anyway. You will never know him the way you could have.

Unlike Bruce Bechdel who grappled with the stark contradiction between his public reality and private urges all his life, my father didn't particularly have any skeletons in his closet. And even if he did I have no way of unraveling that mystery now. But what I do have in common with Bechdel's perspective on her father, is this perplexity, subliminal resentment and an amused incredulity about his life and his deeds. How can he be just a person existing in the past tense now? At least she must have achieved some kind of closure through the creation of this part graphic memoir part literary essay on remembering a loved one. I certainly hope she did.

My rating and review are thus reprehensibly subjective. Do not expect more from a reviewer who has massive daddy issues and will continue to deal with them till the day she breathes her last. I solemnly confess to being more moved by the parts focusing on her family rather than the Künstlerroman-ish bits about her 'coming out' in college and identifying as a butch woman. But what stopped me from rating this any higher is the painfully overwrought sentence construction Bechdel employs which aside from being cringe-worthy at times creates an unwanted dissonance between the import of an emotional moment and its actual graphical representation and execution.

I would see my father one more time after this. But we would never discuss our shared predilection again.

I'm sorry Ms Bechdel but if this is your attempt at cracking a joke on the likelihood of your gay self having a conversation with your gay dad about well being gay, it's kind of pathetic. ...more

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Aug 25, 2012 Dave Schaafsma rated it it was amazing

Shelves: best-graphic-lit-ever, gn-memoir, gn-glbt, gn-bio, best-books-ever, gn-women, gn-course-f-14

I just re-read Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic for my class on YA Graphic Novels with strong girl characters. A celebrated memoir, made into a Tony-award-winning musical. One of the best comics projects of all time. Meticulously wrought, with attention to every single detail in every single panel, this memoir reveals itself fairly early on as a dual "coming out" story of Bechdel and her father. To say when these events take place would be the spoiler, in this story more than the fact of those admi I just re-read Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic for my class on YA Graphic Novels with strong girl characters. A celebrated memoir, made into a Tony-award-winning musical. One of the best comics projects of all time. Meticulously wrought, with attention to every single detail in every single panel, this memoir reveals itself fairly early on as a dual "coming out" story of Bechdel and her father. To say when these events take place would be the spoiler, in this story more than the fact of those admissions. To say that it is an accomplished work of art and memorable story is not to say that any of the members of Bechdel's family are warm and inviting; to the contrary, the often blisteringly candid tone with which she tells her story reveals that none of the Bechdels are easy to get along with (well, her brothers are very peripheral to this story, which leads me to suspect they were not all that interested in being talked about in their sister's story), including Bechdel.

Bechdel--known also for "the Bechdel test," an inquiry into how long a book/film can go without women talking about men--was first famous for her serialized and now lovingly collected Dykes to Watch Out For comic strips, which I read as a straight teenager in alternative rags as I grew up in conservative Grand Rapids, Michigan, my introduction to one warm and political and funny glbtq world. Fun Home focuses on Bechdel's relationship with her father; she has since produced a very different book about her mother, Are You My Mother? which is also remarkable, insightful, accomplished.

Fun Home is also very literary, as Alison and her Dad shared books with each other, so the literary references keep on coming, which as an English teacher type I loved. The title comes from the fact that Bechdel's high school English father also worked part time in the funeral parlor he inherited from his own father, a funeral parlor they also lived in, making ironic the idea of a "fun" home, though it is also clear any home with this family would have been something less than fun. But honesty begets admiration, not cuddles, as with Spiegelman's Maus and other comics. It's not about "making nice;" it's about making truth, and making it beautifully and clearly. Amazing classic.

Bechdel test:

http://bechdeltest.com

NPR interview with Bechel:

http://www.npr.org/2015/08/17/4325694...

Some images so you can see how meticulous Bechdel is with the art, but she is as meticulous with the telling:

https://www.pinterest.com/afoxfox10/f... ...more

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Oct 13, 2018 Whitney Atkinson rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: lgbtqiap, sapphic, graphic-novels, favs-of-2018, memoir, read-in-2018

My life is such a hot ass mess right now that it took me a week to read this even though I loved it. Whereas most graphic novels are quick, fun reads, this is unlike anything I've read before because it’s so rich with meaning. This is like a literary fiction novel tucked into a graphic novel. It made me think, it wowed me with its language, and it definitely provoked a lot of thought about family and sexuality and... I don't know. Emotions?

I guess autobiographical graphic novels are my favorite ...more

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Sep 21, 2015 Darth J rated it liked it · review of another edition

Hmmm...

Well, I wanted to read this for some time, mostly because Alison Bechdel is probably one of the more prominent names that both authors and readers are aware of these days due to her test. Anyway, I wanted to like this more than I did. You see, I'm not really a fan of graphic novels, but it worked here to illustrate her points. However, this whole book felt more like a project of self-analysis than a commercial product. It was extremely personal, yet cold and detached--like Alison's parent ...more

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Sep 24, 2011 Kaion rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: graphic, memoir, unfinished

ETA: This is from the comment section, where somebody rightfully called me out on not bringing proof of Fun Home's badness, and said I just don't understand Bechdel's "stylistic choices". This is me bringing the receipts, including diagrams which I very poorly made in paint. If you just want the review, skip this part.

(view spoiler) ...more

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Jul 21, 2010 Oriana rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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

Book #4 for Jugs & Capes, my all-girl graphic-novel book club!

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 myself through to get to it? I am so glad I did. This book is simply spectacular. It is dense, fraught with meaning, stuffed with prose and complimented by sim ...more

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May 04, 2012 Ted rated it it was amazing

Shelves: biography-autobiography, women-s-works, americana, graphic, have, reviews-liked

Updated

This is a terrific book.

The graphic memoir format added an extraordinary dimension to the story. (I can't recall ever having read a graphic novel before, so in that sense the entire experience of this book was new to me.)

The book was published when Bechdel was in her mid-40s, and tells the story of her own life, up to just before her twentieth birthday, and her father’s life, up to the same point in time, when he was run over by a truck - possibly accidentally, possibly as a suicide.

Som ...more

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Sep 04, 2007 Diane rated it liked it

Shelves: grief, memoirs, comics, graphic-novels

Here's something I don't get to say very often: I liked the Broadway musical better than the comic.

I decided to reread this after seeing the excellent show, and I had a sharper critique of the book this second time around. I first read Fun Home about six years ago after seeing it on some banned book lists, and, reading rebel that I am, I requested it from the library to see what all the fuss was about. It's a "tragicomic" memoir of Bechdel's childhood and her attempt to better understand her fat ...more

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Apr 27, 2008 Sara rated it really liked it

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 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. ...more

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Aug 11, 2018 Paul rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: readingwomenchallenge

This is my first proper graphic novel and is part of a reading challenge for this year. It’s by Alison Bechdel and I hadn’t initially realised I knew her name from the Bechdel test. This is a way of looking at the way women are portrayed in fiction and film. The test is whether a work features at least two women talking to each other about something other than a man. This goes back to Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own:
“All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the s This is my first proper graphic novel and is part of a reading challenge for this year. It’s by Alison Bechdel and I hadn’t initially realised I knew her name from the Bechdel test. This is a way of looking at the way women are portrayed in fiction and film. The test is whether a work features at least two women talking to each other about something other than a man. This goes back to Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own:
“All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. ... And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. ... They are now and then mothers and daughters.”
This is a coming of age tale about Bechdel’s own childhood and adolescence and especially her relationship with her father who died just after she came out as a lesbian whilst at college. The structure of the whole is quite complex and Bechdel has described it as a labyrinth, "going over the same material, but starting from the outside and spiraling in to the center of the story." Bechdel’s father, Bruce, was an English teacher and part time undertaker, who it transpires was gay (having relationships with young men, sometimes his students). The thread running through it all is literature and the way Bechdel uses it in the memoir, this for me, was the strongest part of the book.
Bechdel weaves in a number of works in a way that does not feel forced or contrived. It is quite likely that Bechdel’s father took his own life and this provides one of the focuses as Bechdel looks at Camus and suicide. She also has a lot of fun with Joyce, Ulysses and the Greek myths, looking at fathers (spiritual and temporal). Colette is inevitably referenced with an exploration of the homosexual milieu, as of course is Wilde. Fitzgerald and Shakespeare figure as does Proust. It’s all clever and interesting stuff and is well written.
We learn very little about Bechdel’s mother or siblings, the focus is on her father and their relationship and on her own growing awareness of her own sexuality. At times the young Bechdel does appear a little self-aware, but this is a minor niggle. On the whole I enjoyed this and it was well written and put together and made me think. ...more

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Feb 08, 2020 emma rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: non-ya, 2-stars, memoir, graphic-novel, nonfiction, reviewed, nope, unpopular-opinion

this just...wasn't for me.

not going to write more of a review than: this was 85% literary references, 14% fantastic art, 1% abject suffering.

0% the fun referenced in the title.

bottom line: not for me!!! just a preference thing!

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spent the first few pages of this completely convinced i'd read it before, only to realize i'd started it, not liked it, and put it down.

promising beginning. ...more

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Mar 04, 2009 Peter Derk rated it did not like it

Shelves: did-not-finish

Here's why I give this book only a single star and didn't finish it.

Alison Bechdel is smart. And here's how my relationship goes with people who are chronically, unendingly smart usually goes.

1. I think to myself, "I want to talk to some smart people who have big ideas."

2. I avail myself of a smart person.

3. Smart person tells me an oral sex story, comparing the events to Homeric writings, perhaps even using the word "Homeric".

4. Smart person asks a lot of questions like, "Have you read Proust?" ...more

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Apr 30, 2015 Nandakishore Varma rated it liked it

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is the third comic I have read which is meant exclusively for adults (after The Complete Persepolis and Maus, I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History & Maus, II: And Here My Troubles Began). I must say that out of the three, this one is the most brilliantly drawn and narrated. The three stars are a personal thing.

Alison is a lesbian. This book is an attempt on her part to come to terms with the fact that her father was gay, and possibly a paedophile, something wh Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is the third comic I have read which is meant exclusively for adults (after The Complete Persepolis and Maus, I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History & Maus, II: And Here My Troubles Began). I must say that out of the three, this one is the most brilliantly drawn and narrated. The three stars are a personal thing.

Alison is a lesbian. This book is an attempt on her part to come to terms with the fact that her father was gay, and possibly a paedophile, something which she could not discuss with him properly before he died in an accident (hit by a truck while crossing the road) at the age of forty-four. Alison shares a bond with her father because of their shared "queer"-ness; perhaps the only bond, as their home was never properly a home, just a bunch of people living together in a domicile with no emotional connection.

Ms. Bechdel's father was an English teacher and a renovator and decorator of houses. His obsessive attachment to objects can be seen as an attempt to distance himself emotionally from his family - it may be that he was ashamed of his sexual preferences: a member of his generation could not "come out" in the way Alison could (and did). However, he connects to Alison through a shared and obsessive love of the written word.

Mr. Bechdel's death might have been a suicide - his daughter fantasises it may be, through the fact that a divorce was imminent and the books he was reading just before his death and the literary "clues" he left lying about pointed to the same(Camus' A Happy Death, for example). In fact, this whole book is an attempt by the author to explain her troubled relationship with her family and society in general through epoch-making novels - mainly The Great Gatsby, In Search of Lost Time and Ulysses.

The "Fun Home" of the title is a funeral parlour Mr. Bechdel inherited from his parents: a building filled with cadavers and caskets, where the human body becomes just a lump of flesh to be laid out on a slab and carved (one graphic sequence involving Alison her father and a naked corpse is very powerful). This also becomes a metaphor for Alson's home as the story progresses: only here, it is the souls which are given such cavalier treatment.

Alison Bechdel's art and narrative are fantastic, with layer upon layer of meaning rarely seen in a comic book. The interspersion of literary passages, historical and geographical allusions and personal memoirs is done with consummate mastery, so that the main theme of the book is always in the limelight. And the panels are drawn with a lot of thought given to the exact layout so that the pictures enhance the flow of the narrative seamlessly.

But I somehow could not connect with the story or the characters: maybe because of my sexual preferences, I could not empathise with the protagonist or her concerns. Like I said in the beginning, the three stars are a personal thing.

Warning: the book contains some graphic sexual material. ...more

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Sep 30, 2016 Kelly (and the Book Boar) rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: pitcherbooks, super-meh, read-in-2016, daddy-issues, lgbtq, liburrrrrry-book, i-read-banned-books

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/

Confession time: The only reason I read Fun Home was because it was on the list of most challenged or banned books last year, I had already read more than half of the others on the list and there was a snowball’s chance in hell I’d opt to read The Bible for pleasure.

I had also never heard of Alison Bechdel prior to snatching this one up from the library display (such a badass, right????) and had to Google “The Bechdel Test” to find ...more

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Dec 21, 2007 Earline rated it did not like it

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

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 its 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 ...more

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Apr 13, 2020 Lisa rated it really liked it

Graphic novels are outside my comfort zone; I'm never sure where to rest my eyes on the page. But, I'm so glad I read this one! Bechdel eloquently conveys her confusion around her sexuality as well as her complicated relationship with her father. I loved the frequent literary references. There is a sadness and tenderness that runs through the pages - more tragedy than comedy. ...more

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Sep 26, 2007 Jessica rated it really liked it

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 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. ...more

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Jun 07, 2009 KFed added it

Shelves: favorites

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 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. ...more

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Apr 08, 2012 MJ Nicholls rated it it was amazing

Shelves: merkins, distaff, graphic-novels

Shatters all my preconceptions of the graphic novel, reassures me of the form’s capacity for dense literally allusiveness, intellectual analysis and philosophical ponderings. Brilliant. The writer/artist was raised in a marvellously retro setting—a refurbished mansion kitted out like a Russian estate, with a snobbish bookworm for a father and an upper-class actress manqué for a mother (both of whom taught high-school English). The story attempts grand parallels between the author and her father, ...more

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Dec 28, 2010 Aubrey rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, 4-star, authorness, r-goodreads, 1-read-on-hand, antidote-think-twice-read, r-2015, reviewed, reality-check, antidote-think-twice-all

I could dislike this if I really put my mind to it, but acting out of spite appeals about as much as following out of habit, so I will trust in my years of youthful reading of words and/or images to do the instinctual judgment work for me. It's pitiful, though, how alike the context of this work is to Delta of Venus as Highlander breeds of their respective genres. So there's a lesbian Künstler-graphic-roman running around the top stacks of lauded reading and breakthrough novelty. Why aren't ther I could dislike this if I really put my mind to it, but acting out of spite appeals about as much as following out of habit, so I will trust in my years of youthful reading of words and/or images to do the instinctual judgment work for me. It's pitiful, though, how alike the context of this work is to Delta of Venus as Highlander breeds of their respective genres. So there's a lesbian Künstler-graphic-roman running around the top stacks of lauded reading and breakthrough novelty. Why aren't there ten? Or twenty? Erotica's not the only genre that's suffered in this country through stigmatized neglect. True, I may not have developed as solid a grounding in Japanese lit had my preliminary exploration of comics both moving and static stayed firmly within the homeland, but you win some, you lose some.

Fun Home's a stolid sort of the graphic nature, but I've spent so much time amongst the atrocious anatomies drawn in the name of heteronormativity that Bechdel's rigorous attention paid towards proper proportion and physically possible flexing is a skill in and of itself. Besides, not all the comics I've delved into dealt with world shattering action or blistering physical movement. Bechdel's not the first graphic artist to include autopsies in the panels, or the only to pan out over vast spaces of minute architectural details both exterior and in. She's not Spiegelman or Satrapi or Arakwa or Miura, but I won't pretend I don't relate far more to her excisions of literary text than to theocratic states or battles involving krakens and alchemy.

What this all is, really, is my orienting myself within all the hype surrounding this work with what I've already experienced with its particular media at large. Lit is sci-fi is romance is mystery, much as graphic novel is comic is manga is storybook pictures, and yet the hierarchies keep creeping up. As such, I know exactly why this highly interior, highly cultured, highly neurotic narrative got the praise it did for "not" being what the reader expected, and why said reader will remain content to treat with this representative and little else. I'm sure Bechdel's encouraged those who desire the borderline between word and image and copious reference to the classics of theatre and literature, but the gatekeeping with regards to what will make the New York Times Book Review and what will be pointed at as the downfall of humanity still chafes.

Of course, for all my indulgence in cultural products from across the ocean, I have a firm grasp on what the US written word is up to and nary a finger on the US graphic novel, so I could be wildly off the mark in terms of what fields of creation are healthy and which are not. It's still a bereft situation, though, how few come across my academic plate. To be fair, academia is never holistically good for any art, but there'd be a certain shift of sensibility if one had the option of submitting a graphic essay for English class. One, it'd start tunneling away at the negative overtones of "graphic", which should tell you something linguistic about the situation if nothing else. Two, it might slow down the plummet of funding for the arts of the education system when the necessity for line and color start creeping into the rubric. Three, it'd open up the playing field of "serious" expression to some extent. Reading and writing are both very unnatural habits within the context of the general spread of human evolution, y'know. It'd be good to start reconnecting with the more inherent visuals of artistic theme. ...more

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Mar 18, 2020 Bradley rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2020-shelf, graphic-novels

I guess I will be liking this comic for some of the non-standard reasons. It's not overly pretty. I'm not a huge fan of the artwork but it isn't bad. The story is autobiographical, extremely personal, and wonderfully honest.

The honesty, the unflinching clear-eye about what she is and what her father is, and how the full discovery of both finally came to light? This is probably my favorite bit.

Of course, without the extra flavors, pure honesty is never quite as amusing.

A close second is the beaut ...more

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Jan 05, 2021 Gretchen Rubin added it · review of another edition

I LOVED this book. I've been meaning to read it for years. ...more

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Play Book Tag: [pb]Fun Home: A family tragicomic, by Allison Bechdel, 4 stars	1	9	Oct 04, 2020 10:02PM
Play Book Tag: (Poll Ballot) Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel - 3 1/2 stars	4	12	Sep 28, 2020 01:50PM
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Play Book Tag: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic = Alison Bechdel (4 stars)	5	11	Apr 28, 2020 03:48PM
Ler en galego: Clube de Lectura. Xaneiro-Febreiro 2020 (Con Spoilers)	7	27	Feb 20, 2020 02:06PM
Ler en galego: Clube de Lectura. Xaneiro-Febreiro 2020 (Sen Spoilers)	4	25	Feb 16, 2020 02:39PM

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About Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel

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Alison Bechdel is an American cartoonist. Originally best known for the long-running comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, in 2006 she became a best-selling and critically acclaimed author with her graphic memoir Fun Home.

Books by Alison Bechdel

New, Improved! Dykes to Watch Out For (DtWOF, #3)

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“I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.” — 90 likes

“It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone.” — 62 likes

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