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| Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Edition 001)
Paperback
Author: Alison Bechdel
Publisher: Mariner Books
Release Date: 2008-10-29
ISBN-10: 0618871713
ISBN-13: 9780618871711
List Price: $13.95
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
In this groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father. In her hands, personal history becomes a work of amazing subtlety and power, written with controlled force and enlivened with humor, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail.
Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the "Fun Home." It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.
Picture Imperfect
| Customer Rating: | | The fact that it's a graphic novel isn't what makes Alison Bechdel's revelatory memoir about growing up in a funeral home with her mother, siblings and her erudite, closeted father such a dazzler, though without it (she is the author of the syndicated comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For), one would miss this artist's wry, loopy visual depiction of the rural upstate where she grew up, and the encyclopedic ambivalence of faces that often convey more human truth than those of flesh and blood. But it's her literary voice that makes Fun Home a must-read bildungsroman in this age of Proposition 8 and America's morality wars: it's naked, full of wit and pain in its observance of one woman's gay coming of age. |
Rich and impressive - doesn't feel skimpy like other graphic novels
| Customer Rating: | With relatively few exceptions, one of the reasons I haven't really gone back to the graphic novel scene has been that empty feeling after going through dozens of pages of pictures without the sense of having really "read" anything. This isn't a pot-shot at the genre, but rather an expression of the frustration that comes with buying something that costs $35.00 but feeling like I got about $10 worth of reading out of it. This could be a crass way of looking at the problem, but it's rare that artwork can cover up poor storytelling.
I held off reading Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home" until recently, and regret waiting since it is even better than the hype. Non-graphic-novel types frequently name drop specific titles to appear a bit more edgy (can't do that with "Watchmen" anymore, though, as it's now a movie) and in the know, so I stayed away from "Fun Home" for fear of overexcited buzz. This is definitely not the case. Bechdel is not only a compelling artist but an unexpectedly powerful writer as well, a combination that is sadly missing from many of her contemporaries. You could probably just put out the text of "Fun Home" and still be moved.
basic, basic plot: This is a memoir of Bechdel's childhood in the shadow of her closeted father's serious struggles to stay closeted (ultimately resulting in his suicide), and the connections she makes to the discovery of her own homosexuality. This is by no means light reading, but you will have no trouble sitting down to it. Even though you know how it ends, you know that the point is how things got there. This is perhaps a game we all play with our own dissections of past events, and fortunately Bechdel gives her own story a worthwhile examination that we have been invited to.
I'm so pleased that I finally got around to reading it. I am greatly surprised at this sense of satisfaction after reading the book. I don't feel at all like I just looked at a skimpy collection of pictures. This book isn't very long, but you definitely leave with the sense of having read a meaty story that even demands another visit, even as you wish that things had been easier for the Bechdels.
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Great Book, Worth Reading
| Customer Rating: | | The book might seem tedious at first, but its worth reading to the end, do not give up halfway like i almost did. This is by far one of teh best books i have ever read. In no way a simple story, it weaves an intricate narrative, that gets to a huge level of personal details that leave you feeling like you know the author more than anybody else you know in your life. |
The complexities of identity
| Customer Rating: | I live an hour away from Beech Creek, Alison Bechdel's tiny hometown and the setting for much of her graphic memoir Fun Home. I've always found the area oppressive: dark, looming mountains casting perpetual shadows on impoverished, dying valley towns. But after reading Fun Home, I revisited Beech Creek, to see Bechdel's childhood home and the grave of her father Bruce, and to remind myself of how cruelly ironic life can be.
Bruce Bechdel, a man who loves literature (in his early days he identified with F. Scott Fitzgerald; in his final days he reads Proust), an aesthete with a taste for the baroque detail of the Victorian era, and a creative and versatile designer of interior and exterior landscapes, is born and lives in rural central Pennsylvania, running the family funeral home and teaching at the local high school. He never quite fits in. Always sun-tanned and exquisitely dressed (no plaid hunter's shirts or chewing tobacco for him), persnickety and a bit prissy, but at the same time speaking with a back-country twang, Bruce seems uncannily out of place in Beech Creek.
And he's a closeted gay man, who has occasional affairs on the side and otherwise sublimates his repressed sexuality by obsessively restoring the Victorian-era house in which Alison grew up. The tension of his closeted life makes him aloof, prone to violent temper tantrums, controlling, and sometimes cruel to both wife and children.
Alison's Bechdel's memoir of him, and the way in which her own identity both became the inverse of his and yet in many respects parallels his, is a sophisticated narrative that underscores just how complex personal identity is. Alison is who she is, just as her father was who he was, because of the convergence of Beech Creek, sexuality, alienation, fun, repression, the need to be creative, the yearning for affection, the factuality of history and the re-creation of memory. There's no formulaic happy ending here, no artificial structuring to make more sense of the relationship between herself and her father than there really was. Instead, what the reader is offered is a profound, sensitive, bittersweet effort to explore memory in search of identity--an effort which throughout is punctuated by Bechdel's references to both Proust and James Joyce--and an appreciation for the ironies of fate which make us who we become.
Other reviewers have mentioned that they read the memoir at one setting. I found it so intense that I could only take it in small portions, and even then I sometimes felt overwhelmed. For in sharing her own identity-forming memories with us, she invites us to plumb more deeply into our own. And both exercises, although potentially liberating, can also be harrowing. |
disappointing
| Customer Rating:  | I knew she was a cartoonist but did not know the memoir would be in cartoon form. It was reasonably well written but her family members just didn't come alive for me.
As a lesbian, I found it especially upsetting to read about yet another woman who felt like she had come home when she put on her father's clothes. |
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