Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

"Fun Home" is an absolutely stunning work: the best text that I have read in a long, long time. Bechdel is an amazing storyteller: she knows what to say when and how. Yet, she understands, appreciates, and accepts life's complexities without trying to force her way through them. Her bond with her father, for instance, is shown in the book to be what it must have been: complicated and unusual but still warm and affecting. This makes "Fun Home" such a special book. Most readers will thus likely feel that Bechdel has found the best way, structure, style, and drawings to tell the story of her family and herself in the text--a manner of writing that almost achieves the perfect match between form and content.

Tragic mostly,beautiful always,warm occasionaly. Dont know what to feel, really. A coming of age story with some great literary references.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel is a graphic memoir. It's the author's story of her relationship with her father. She comes as a lesbian in college and later finds out that her father is gay. The book is very emotional and shows an extremely complicated family dynamic. I really admire the author in penning down her own story in this wonderful graphic novel. .

Fun Home was my introduction to Alison Bechdel and I enjoyed it very much - it is a beautiful, raw and poignant book that is also funny in parts. It is similar to Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis in the sense that it also uses humor to deal with serious issues, but it leans more towards being a "confessional" graphic novel than Persepolis does. I have just ordered a second book - a compilation of her Dykes to Watch Out For series, which ran successfully for 25 years and is considered one of the earliest representations of LGBTs in American popular culture.

Pastime/reading

the writing is great as I am Still reading the book but the quality of print is less than satisfactory with double-prints and smudginess all around.

One of the best graphic novels I have ever read. Highly recommended. Brutally honest and courageous work.

The most beautiful book to be ever read. Bechdel's life from a confused child and a distant teen to a woman who explores her life throughout, gives one immense satisfaction of having completed something that isn't any different than a fictional story had that been concluded.

Une BD passionnante, qui multiplie les flash-back et les références littéraires, qui fonctionne comme un puzzle, en ne donnant à voir d'abord qu'une petite partie de l'ensemble,avant de se révéler et prendre tout son sens. L'auteure, Alison Bechdel, parsème son récit d'allusions discrètes, à travers le texte ou les dessins, et nous offre à voir son enfance, son adolescence et sa jeunesse, tandis qu'elle-même cherche à y trouver une explication, un sens. C'est beau, c'est sobre, c'est infiniment touchant et humain, comme un "A la recherche du temps perdu" moderne.

One of the best books I've read recently, I've fallen in love with Alison Bechdel way of drawing as well as writing. To write such a deep and personal story, drenching the book in a fun yet tragic atmosphere... It's like magic. I really recommend you buy this book, like, right now.

I chose this for my bookclub to read as an example of a graphic novel, none of us ever having read one before. I quickly realised that this was a memoir which made it even more interesting. From the start there are pointers that her life is developing into a tragic tale. We are left in no doubt that her father was a complicated man with many internal torments. The language is rich and luxurious with the great use of some unusual words (one or two even had me looking up definitions). I've now read a few graphic books and think this book is put together brilliantly. The words and pictures both add to each other. There is great detail in the graphics as well, many of which add more to the story than the words can alone. There is much tragedy but it is related in a blackly humorous way (man times crossing back and forward the line between comedy and tragedy). The narrative sections break into four types: the overall story telling, dialogue in speech bubbles, occasional explanatory notes and labels highlighting an element of a drawing. Essentially the book is about a father and daughter relationship. They struggle to come to terms with their differences whilst refusing to acknowledge their obvious similarities. Much of the commonality is around literature and the arts, leading to a few points where the author relies too heavily on literary references. However, I very much liked the reliance on the artistic talents in the family, particularly the mother's acting which allows her to step away from her real world. What strikes me most about this book is the depth of emotion that is written into every, carefully chosen, word. It can be a cliche to say that the process of writing is cathartic but, with this book, that feels appropriate.

Produto de boa qualidade, em forma e conteúdo <3 Alison Bechdel acerta nos detalhes, nas ironias, e a história vai direto no coração .

I heard of Fun Home from a 1h class at the Collège de France, a reference place of culture for the french elite. It was presented as an example of how comics can be the best media to present a story, here an autobiographical one. And, guess what: it's going to get the highest recognition in the 7th art (Comics) in the top french festival - this is the recognition of the full french-belgian scene and beyond! So, about the book. The story is very difficult: what can be more difficult to treat with a good story flow than the problems of identity and finding one's way in life. Chronologically, you take a long time to get to the point. If you jump straight (! The book is about living a life in a small town while having homosexual preferences) to the point, you need to do many flashbacks. The author defined a great flow and it becomes a page turner where we discover step by step how she builds herself, while the true face of her dad gets uncovered step by step- a person full of control but with a second life, that turns the family into a kind of a theater scene full of rules of engagement and sadness. The art itself is quite good and clear. At the end, this book left a very strong impression on me. It was such a work of exposing oneself in there, and evoking a topic that is so difficult: was her father truly gay? Likely. Shes sure of that. Yet the book is written with her voice, and she explains also how she became aware of her own homosexuality, making a parallel. The full work is therefore quite transparent: it is her understanding, and her position, that that was the true story of her family. Fact or interpretation? Eventually, is it really our business? The most important is the testimony of a family, ruined by normsand how they played with one another (the importance to keep a good example for the wife, the children and the community)... Being a human isn't simple. So I really liked this book, because of its honesty, its picture of the human nature in our daily lives and because it is truly a masterwork. No need for a university teacher to tell you that, just read it yourself.