Fun Home
A Family Tragicomic
Published on 14. September 2006
Book
Paperback/Softback
240 pages
978-0-224-08051-4 (ISBN)
Description
DISCOVER the BESTSELLING GRAPHIC MEMOIR behind the Olivier Award nominated musical.
'A sapphic graphic treat' The Times
A moving and darkly humorous family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Alison Bechdel's gothic drawings. If you liked Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis you'll love this.
Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high-school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and the family babysitter. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive.
Interweaving between childhood memories, college life and present day, and through narrative that is equally heartbreaking and fiercely funny, Alison looks back on her complex relationship with her father and finds they had more in common than she ever knew.
'A groundbreaking masterpiece' The Independent
'A finely woven blend of yearning and euphoric fantasy' Evening Standard
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**
'A sapphic graphic treat' The Times
A moving and darkly humorous family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Alison Bechdel's gothic drawings. If you liked Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis you'll love this.
Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high-school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and the family babysitter. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive.
Interweaving between childhood memories, college life and present day, and through narrative that is equally heartbreaking and fiercely funny, Alison looks back on her complex relationship with her father and finds they had more in common than she ever knew.
'A groundbreaking masterpiece' The Independent
'A finely woven blend of yearning and euphoric fantasy' Evening Standard
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**
Reviews / Votes
Fun Home and Are You My Mother? are the kind of head-spinningly thoughtful and textured works that make you rejoice in the comic-book form. * Daily Telegraph * Bulging with literary allusions from Proust to Scott Fitzgerald, Fun Home is a book that demands to be read again and again. * Royal Academy Magazine * One of the very best graphic novels ever * Booklist * A brilliant, bleakly hilarious memoir in comic-book form * Time * An astonishing advertisement for this emerging literary form * Entertainment Weekly * A beautiful, assured piece of work... Bechdel's cartooning has transmuted [her father's] life and death into an extraordinary book * Salon.com * A work of passion... It's perhaps one of the best books I've read that explores sexuality and identity * Writing Magazine * Bechdel's childhood and youthful reckoning with her own sexuality is...by turns, hilarious, profound and affecting * i, *Christmas Gift Guide 2025* * Every single frame of Fun Home is packed with meaning that's intensely personal for Bechdel, yet impactful and thought-provoking...to readers * Cambridge Edition *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Illustrations
Throughout
Dimensions
Height: 228 mm
Width: 146 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
392 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-224-08051-4 (9780224080514)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Person
Alison Bechdel is the author of the bestselling memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and, most recently, Are You My Mother? For twenty-five years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life - queer and otherwise - considered 'one of the pre-eminent oeuvres in the comics genre.' Alison Bechdel is guest editor of Best American Comics, 2011, and has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney's, Entertainment Weekly, Granta, and the New York Times Book Review.