Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Edition 001) | 
 enlarge | Author: Alison Bechdel
Publisher: Mariner Books
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
Buy New: $4.99
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Rating:  96 reviews
Sales Rank: 885
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 232
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.7
ISBN: 0618871713
Dewey Decimal Number: 741.5973
EAN: 9780618871711
ASIN: 0618871713
Publication Date: October 29, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: New paperback, clean and unmarked.
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Product Description
In this groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father. In her hands, personal history becomes a work of amazing subtlety and power, written with controlled force and enlivened with humor, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail.
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 few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 91 more reviews...
 fantastic, read it! December 26, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Read this book. It was both challenging and easy to read. compelling story, amazing vocabulary, a great gift for young people studying history, psychology, graduate students and people who were once graduate students. just wonderful.
Awesome Graphic Novel - best read without knowing the story! (beware plot spoilers in most of the other reviews) December 15, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Bechdel rocks as a comic artist for over 20 years.
This book is a huge, surprising, candid, funny, serious, revealing slice of her real (you-can't-make-this-stuff-up) life. (and the art is so pleasant)
If you like this kind of work, spend the ten bucks, you won't be sorry.
PS
try to read it without reading about the story/plot in a review, the story really twists and turns and all that will be lost if you hear about it in some blunt summary!
Entertaining, deep, great inclusion of literary and mythical refernces December 12, 2008
I was required to read this novel for my Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgendered experience course. I loved the graphics, her choice in detail gives the reader additional information that just what is discussed, and adds to the overall emotional effect. She chose an interesting organization, the novel moves through different memories and still retains a focus. She infuses her writing with literary and mythical references which contribute meaning and entertain. This was the first graphic novel I have read, as well as the first novel concerning the LGBT community. It was a great quick read, and I would recommend it to any one.
Picture Imperfect December 1, 2008
The fact that it's a graphic novel isn't what makes Alison Bechdel's revelatory memoir about growing up in a funeral home with her mother, siblings and her erudite, closeted father such a dazzler, though without it (she is the author of the syndicated comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For), one would miss this artist's wry, loopy visual depiction of the rural upstate where she grew up, and the encyclopedic ambivalence of faces that often convey more human truth than those of flesh and blood. But it's her literary voice that makes Fun Home a must-read bildungsroman in this age of Proposition 8 and America's morality wars: it's naked, full of wit and pain in its observance of one woman's gay coming of age.
Rich and impressive - doesn't feel skimpy like other graphic novels October 30, 2008
With relatively few exceptions, one of the reasons I haven't really gone back to the graphic novel scene has been that empty feeling after going through dozens of pages of pictures without the sense of having really "read" anything. This isn't a pot-shot at the genre, but rather an expression of the frustration that comes with buying something that costs $35.00 but feeling like I got about $10 worth of reading out of it. This could be a crass way of looking at the problem, but it's rare that artwork can cover up poor storytelling.
I held off reading Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home" until recently, and regret waiting since it is even better than the hype. Non-graphic-novel types frequently name drop specific titles to appear a bit more edgy (can't do that with "Watchmen" anymore, though, as it's now a movie) and in the know, so I stayed away from "Fun Home" for fear of overexcited buzz. This is definitely not the case. Bechdel is not only a compelling artist but an unexpectedly powerful writer as well, a combination that is sadly missing from many of her contemporaries. You could probably just put out the text of "Fun Home" and still be moved.
basic, basic plot: This is a memoir of Bechdel's childhood in the shadow of her closeted father's serious struggles to stay closeted (ultimately resulting in his suicide), and the connections she makes to the discovery of her own homosexuality. This is by no means light reading, but you will have no trouble sitting down to it. Even though you know how it ends, you know that the point is how things got there. This is perhaps a game we all play with our own dissections of past events, and fortunately Bechdel gives her own story a worthwhile examination that we have been invited to.
I'm so pleased that I finally got around to reading it. I am greatly surprised at this sense of satisfaction after reading the book. I don't feel at all like I just looked at a skimpy collection of pictures. This book isn't very long, but you definitely leave with the sense of having read a meaty story that even demands another visit, even as you wish that things had been easier for the Bechdels.
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