LITERATURE
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic ALISON BECHDEL
This graphic memoir tells the story of Alison Bechdel’s childhood and complex relationship with her meticulous, controlling and deeply closeted father, who died suddenly when Bechdel was 20, just four weeks after she’d come out to her parents and two weeks after her mother had asked her father for a divorce. Their family home in Pennsylvania was akin to a living museum – a gothic revival mansion brought back to life by her father who painstakingly restored every historic detail and sourced original furniture to fill the rooms. He’d returned to his hometown to work in the family business, a funeral home (or ‘fun’ home, as Bechdel and her siblings dub it), up close and personal with death on a regular basis. As an adult, Bechdel slowly learns more of her father’s history, reflecting on their similarities and the contrasts of the eras in which they came of age. No doubt everything would have unfolded differently if her father had been able to live openly. Every single frame of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is packed with meaning that’s intensely personal for Bechdel, yet impactful and thought-provoking even to readers who didn’t grow up in this very specific set of circumstances. It’s clear why this won so many awards, and is still regularly included on lists of the best graphic novels of all time.
ALL FUN AND GAMES UNTIL... Tragicomedy meets graphic novel in Bechdel’s breathtaking, genre-bending autobiographical book
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