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 … 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’d heard a lot about this book from coworkers and I never need an excuse to pick up a graphic novel — especially one that’a standalone. Fans of Persepolis will like this coming-of-age story that elegantly encompasses some very complex themes including suicide, the death of a parent, being closeted, and coming out. For all that, this book never …
Awesome book, seriously, awesome. Read this book and laugh and be impressed by A. Bechdel’s brilliance. That is all.
You wouldn’t have thought a woman’s memoir of her closeted gay father, whose suicide dovetails with her own coming out, would feel both personal and universal to the average reader, but that’s only part of the joy of this glorious book. It is funny and witty as well as searingly sad. Its very specificity – the small town, the unhappy family, the …
Alison Bechdel is better know for the “Bechdel test” (I’m seriously curious about how you pronounce that), the test where a fictional work needs 2 female characters talking about something other than men to pass, a small requirement that nevertheless very few modern books and especially movies, pass (although far from a perfect feminist test). I …
I enjoyed the graphic novel. She had an interesting and somewhat tragic childhood which lead to a tragic loss of her father when she was 20 years old. After reading the book, I am curious to see how it plays out in a Broadway play.
If you have seen the musical, or have heard about it, I think it would be worth the read. Please be aware that …