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  • Published: 1 December 2006
  • ISBN: 9780224080514
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $35.00

Fun Home

A Family Tragicomic




The bestselling memoir from a cult favourite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books.

Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, the New York Times, and People.


DISCOVER the BESTSELLING GRAPHIC MEMOIR behind the Olivier Award nominated musical.

'A sapphic graphic treat' The Times

A moving and darkly humorous family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Alison Bechdel's gothic drawings. If you liked Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis you'll love this.

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 the family babysitter. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive.

Interweaving between childhood memories, college life and present day, and through narrative that is equally heartbreaking and fiercely funny, Alison looks back on her complex relationship with her father and finds they had more in common than she ever knew.


'A groundbreaking masterpiece' The Independent

'A finely woven blend of yearning and euphoric fantasy' Evening Standard
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

  • Published: 1 December 2006
  • ISBN: 9780224080514
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $35.00

About the author

Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel is the author of the bestselling memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, People among others. For twenty-five years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life - queer and otherwise - considered 'one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre.' Alison Bechdel is guest editor of Best American Comics, 2011, and has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney's, Entertainment Weekly, Granta, and The New York Times Book Review. In 2014 she was named as one of the recipients of the MacArthur Foundation Grant.

http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/

Also by Alison Bechdel

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Praise for Fun Home

Fun Home and Are You My Mother? are the kind of head-spinningly thoughtful and textured works that make you rejoice in the comic-book form.

Daily Telegraph

Bulging with literary allusions from Proust to Scott Fitzgerald, Fun Home is a book that demands to be read again and again.

Royal Academy Magazine

One of the very best graphic novels ever

Booklist

A brilliant, bleakly hilarious memoir in comic-book form

Time

A beautiful, assured piece of work... Bechdel's cartooning has transmuted [her father's] life and death into an extraordinary book

Salon.com

A work of passion... It's perhaps one of the best books I've read that explores sexuality and identity

Writing Magazine

It is 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... A comic book for lovers of words! 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

New York Times

Bechdel's memoir offers a graphic narrative of uncommon richness, depth, literary resonance and psychological complexity . . . shares [much] in spirit with the work of Mary Karr, Tobias Wolff, and other contemporary memoirists of considerable literary accomplishement

Kirkus Reviews

The recursively told story, which revisits the sites of tragic desperation again and again, hits notes that resemble Jeanette Winterson at her best... She's made a story that's quiet, dignified and not easy to put down

Publishers Weekly

A brilliant, bleakly hilarious memoir in comic-book form

Time

An astonishing advertisement for this emerging literary form

Entertainment Weekly

One of the very best graphic novels ever

Booklist

A beautiful, assured piece of work... Bechdel's cartooning has transmuted [her father's] life and death into an extraordinary book

Salon.com