Fun Home : A Family Tragicomic
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Hardcover
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Book Details
Written by Alison Bechdel.
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($19.95)
Editorial Review (from Amazon.com)
A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books.This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form.
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 fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.
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I am "L" thinks this book is Worth Reading.
I have to say, it must take a lot of guts to air the family dark secrets in public. The book is spectacularly drawn and painfully honest. Obviously cathartic for the author, I have to ask... what is it for the reader? I am a big fan of Dykes To Watch Out For, and, graphically speaking, I think this is the best she's ever done. Unlike th drawings, the story never pulled me in. It felt distant and vouyeristic. That being said, I still think it is worth a read, especially if you are a fan of Alison Bechdel's work.