Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Brief Description:
Autobiography of artist Alison Bechdel explores her relationship with her family, specifically her father.

Marc Notes:
A Mariner book.;Autobiography of artist Alison Bechdel explores her relationship with her family, specifically her father.

Brief Description:
CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED, NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"The great writing of the twenty-first century may well be found in graphic novels and nonfiction....Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is an astonishing advertisement for this emerging literary form." - USA Today

"Graphic storytelling at its most profound." - Los Angeles Times, Favorite Book of the Year

"A splendid autobiography...refreshingly open and generous." - Entertainment Weekly

"Fun Home must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced. . . .pioneering." - New York Times Book Review

"A masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other." - Time Magazine

"A splendid autobiography...refreshingly open and generous." --Entertainment Weekly "Fun Home must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced. . . . pioneering." --The New York Times Book Review "A masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other." --Time Magazine "Graphic storytelling at its most profound." --Los Angeles Times, Favorite Book of the Year "The great writing of the twenty-first century may well be found in graphic novels and nonfiction....Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is an astonishing advertisement fro this emerging literary form." --USA Today "Brilliant and bittersweet." --The Boston Globe "Beautiful combines the mundane with the macabre, adding doses of wry, poignant humor on every page." --Washington Post "One of the best memoirs of the decade ... at once hypercontrolled and utterly intimate." --New York Magazine, Best Books of the Year "A revelation ... feels like a true literary achievement, something with characters who baffle and disappoint and break hears the way people do in life and in the best of prose." --Minneapolis Star-Tribune "If David Sedaris could draw, and if Bleak House had been a little funnier, you'd have Alison Bechdel's Fun Home." --Amy Bloom, author of A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You "Alison Bechdel - she's one of the best, one to watch out for." --Harvey Pekar "Masterful...an enormously successful work." --Village Voice "A staggeringly literate and revealing autobiography." --Seattle Times "Brave and forthright and insightful--exactly what Alison Bechdel does best." --Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina "Stupendous...mesmerizing...The details...are devastatingly captured by an artist in total control of her craft." --Chip Kidd, author of The Cheese Monkeys "[Alison Bechdel] hits notes that resemble Jeanette Winterson at her best...She's made a story that's quiet [and] dignified." --Publishers Weekly, Starred "[With] uncommon richness [and] depth...[Fun Home] shares as much in spirit with...other contemporary memoirists of considerable literary accomplishment." --Kirkus Reviews, Starred "One of the very best graphic novels ever." --Booklist, ALA, Starred Review

CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED, NATIONAL BESTSELLER

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21^ST CENTURY

Time Magazine #1 Book of the Year - National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

Winner of the Stonewall Book Award - Double finalist for the Lambda Book Award

Alison Bechdel's groundbreaking, bestselling literary graphic memoir that 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 few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.

In her hands, personal history becomes a work of amazing subtlety and power, a unique coming-of-age story written with controlled force and enlivened with humor, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail.

How does a daughter resolve the legacy of mystery left by the man she called her father?

• Family Secrets: Growing up in the family funeral home, nicknamed the "Fun Home," was only the first layer of mystery in a household built on secrets.
• LGBTQ+ Coming of Age: As Alison comes out as a lesbian in college, she makes a discovery about her father that forces her to re-examine her entire childhood.
• A Complicated Father-Daughter Story: A raw and honest exploration of a fraught relationship with a distant, exacting, and enigmatic father.
• Literary Nonfiction: A narrative woven with rich literary allusions and heartbreaking honesty that redefines what a graphic memoir can be.

Review Citations:

• Entertainment Weekly 12/11/2009 pg. 84 (EAN 9780618871711, Paperback)
• Library Journal 03/01/2014 pg. 48 (EAN 9780618871711, Paperback) - *Starred Review
• Entertainment Weekly 03/06/2015 pg. 72 (EAN 9780618871711, Paperback)
• Library Journal Prepub Alert 02/15/2006 pg. 102 (EAN 9780618477944, Hardcover)
• Publishers Weekly 02/27/2006 pg. 40 (EAN 9780618477944, Hardcover) - *Starred Review
• Kirkus Reviews 03/01/2006 pg. 216 (EAN 9780618477944, Hardcover) - *Starred Review
• Booklist 03/15/2006 pg. 37 (EAN 9780618477944, Hardcover) - *Starred Review
• Entertainment Weekly 06/02/2006 pg. 86 (EAN 9780618477944, Hardcover)
• People Weekly 06/12/2006 pg. 51 (EAN 9780618477944, Hardcover)
• Lambda Book Report 04/01/2006 pg. 14 (EAN 9780618477944, Hardcover)
• New York Times 06/18/2006 pg. 9 (EAN 9780618477944, Hardcover)
• Library Journal 07/01/2006 pg. 58 (EAN 9780618477944, Hardcover)
• Booksense '76 June 2006 06/01/2006 pg. 1 (EAN 9780618477944, Hardcover)
• People Weekly 12/25/2006 pg. 55 (EAN 9780618477944, Hardcover)
• Time 12/25/2006 pg. 182 (EAN 9780618477944, Hardcover)
• Entertainment Weekly 12/29/2006 pg. 137 (EAN 9780618477944, Hardcover)
• Library Journal 03/15/2007 pg. 53 (EAN 9780618477944, Hardcover)
• Shelf Awareness 12/30/0001 (EAN 9780618477944, Hardcover)
• Wilson Graphic Novels Catalog 04/11/2019 (EAN 9780618477944, Hardcover)
• Wilson Nonfiction Catalog 04/11/2019 (EAN 9780618477944, Hardcover)

Contributor Bio:Bechdel, Alison

Alison Bechdel's cult following for her early comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For expanded wildly for her family memoirs, the New York Times bestselling and Time magazine #1 Book of the Year graphic memoir Fun Home, adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical, and Are You My Mother? Most recently, The Secret to Superman Strength was named a New York Times Best Graphic Novel of 2021. Bechdel has been named a MacArthur Fellow, among many other honors.