Fun Home A Family Tragicomic (Paperback)
| Author: Alison Bechdel |
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Product Details:
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN-10: 0618871713
ISBN-13: 9780618871711
Sku: 203520089
Publish Date: 5/30/2007
Dimensions:
(in Inches) 9H x 6L x 0.75T
Pages:
232
Age Range:
NA
See more in Nonfiction
Like many fathers, mine could occasionally be prevailed on for a spot of 'airplane.' As he launched me, my full weight would fall on the pivot point between his feet and my stomach. It was a discomfort well worth the rare physical contact, and certainly worth the moment of perfect balance when I soared above him. (from the first line)
| Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and funny, readers are drawn into a daughters complex yearning for her father. Apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. |
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From the Publisher:
An unusual memoir done in the form of a graphic novel by a cult favorite comic artist offers a darkly funny family portrait that details her relationship with her father, a historic preservation expert dedicated to restoring the family's Victorian home, funeral home director, high-school English teacher, and closeted homosexual. Reprint. |
Annotation:
Alison Bechdel, known for the wonderfully funny and politically astute comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, has created an intense, brilliantly crafted memoir about her deeply closeted father in graphic novel format. Bruce Bechdel, a funeral director and English teacher, obsessively restored their 19th-century home, stayed in the confines of the family's rural Pennsylvania town, and much to his daughter's shock, seduced teenage boys. Committing suicide just a few months after Alison came out to the family, she ruminates over the timing, unfolds feelings and thoughts in a series of memories, moving around fluidly in time, with the selective use of letters, diaries, and photographs. Comparing her father to Daedalus, Proust, and Fitzgerald, among others, Bechdel has created a literary-laced examination of familial connections that is piercingly honest. For each panel, she took a digital photograph of herself in position as a resource for the drawings, taking almost 1,000 pictures in all. A 2006 New York Times Notable Book and Time Magazine's #1 book of 2006.
Alison Bechdel, known for the wonderfully funny and politically astute comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, has created an intense, brilliantly crafted memoir about her deeply closeted father in graphic novel format. Bruce Bechdel, a funeral director and English teacher, obsessively restored their 19th-century home, stayed in the confines of the family's rural Pennsylvania town, and much to his daughter's shock, seduced teenage boys. Committing suicide just a few months after Alison came out to the family, she ruminates over the timing, unfolds feelings and thoughts in a series of memories, moving around fluidly in time, with the selective use of letters, diaries, and photographs. Comparing her father to Daedalus, Proust, and Fitzgerald, among others, Bechdel has created a literary-laced examination of familial connections that is piercingly honest. For each panel, she took a digital photograph of herself in position as a resource for the drawings, taking almost 1,000 pictures in all. A 2006 New York Times Notable Book and Time Magazine's #1 book of 2006.
Praise
"In this brilliant, bleakly hilarious memoir in comic-book form, [Alison] Bechdel combines stories from her emotionally barren but weirdly fascinating childhood with elegant allusions to Proust and Joyce to make a gripping story of filial sleuthery and, in the end, hard earned acceptance."
- Lev Grossman
05/29/2006
"[Alison Bechdel's] language and drawings are impressively sensitive to the details of her physical experience and to the trickier folds of her own self-consciousness; she dives over and over into the cloudy waters of her past, swimming deeper every time....FUN HOME is a beautiful, assured piece of work."
- Douglas Wolk
06/05/2006
"[A] pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics and memoir) in multiple new directions, with panels that combine the detail and technical proficiency of R. Crumb with a seriousness, emotional complexity and innovation completely its own...Bechdel's rich language and precise images combine to create a lush piece of work--a memoir where concision and detail are melded for maximum, obsessive density."
- Sean Wilsey
06/18/2006
"FUN HOME...shows how powerfully--and economically--the medium can portray autobiographical narrative...The last chapter of FUN HOME is its most brilliant, and most moving, in part because Bechdel finally surpasses her father: She becomes the artist he always wished he could be. "
07/11/2006

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