Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (2006)
January 24th, 2009 | Categories: Reviews | 2 CommentsLast semester, the Lit class I took did a unit on comics, or graphic novels. The only comics I’ve ever read are Calvin and Hobbes, so I was a little unsure of what to expect when reading Fun Home. Would there be a story? Would it be all images, with little focus on narration? How different is a graphic novel from a traditional novel?
Fun Home
The blurb on the back of the novel is as follows:
In this groundbreaking, best-selling 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 gay. A few weeks after this relevation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to solve.
Fun Home is nothing short of amazing. Bechdel carefully juxtaposes her drawings with narration, and there are many literary themes and allusions that run throughout the entire graphic novel. Her story is a haunting one, and the tenuous bond between herself and her father resonates throughout the entire story. Her relationship with her father is heartbreaking, and while the dance the two do around each other throughout their entire relationship is the heart of the book, Bechdel also branches out to the other members of her family as well as her own journey from childhood to womanhood. Bechdel’s drawings are superb, and she often references her own childhood journal as she tells the story, which makes the book seem that much more true to life.
I was really impressed by Fun Home. I strongly recommend it, it’s a fairly easy read as it’s not a traditional novel, and Bechdel does a phenomenal job using both narration and images to tell her incredibly unique story. I’m excited for the release of her next graphic memoir, tentatively titled Love Life: A Case Study.
Overall Rating: 9.5/10
Tags: books
Subscribe Feed (RSS)
Hi, I'm Manda. I'm a college student studying communications and languages. I like to read, shop, bake, and travel. I have a tendency to listen to my favorite songs on repeat for hours on end. Sometimes I catch myself thinking in a language other than English. 
I heard of that novel, and I heard it was really good so I must take a look at it soon :)
If you’ve taken an interest in graphic novels, may I recommend Persepolis? I absolutely adore this novel! It’s about a girl and her times during the wars in Iran, and it continues on to her teen years, her university years, and her adulthood. I believe it’s an auto-biography told by Marjane, but someone draws the comics. It made a very powerful impression on me when I read it last summer. :)
And another graphic novel I read is called Maus. And it’s a story from the holocaust, where the Nazi’s are symbolized by cats, the Jews are mice, the Americans are dogs, and the Poles are pigs. It’s very interesting!
I’ll have to take a look on Fun Home on paperbackswap. :)
I have heard of Persepolis and Maus, I’ll have to check them out. One of my good friends recommended Maus to me as well! I think Persepolis was turned into a movie too, but I want to read the graphic novel first.
Let me know what you think of Fun Home if you get a chance to read it! :)