A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. 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 a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
fantastic, read it!:
Read this book. It was both challenging and easy to read. compelling story, amazing vocabulary, a great gift for young people studying history, psychology, graduate students and people who were once graduate students. just wonderful.
Awesome Graphic Novel - best read without knowing the story! (beware plot spoilers in most of the other reviews):
Bechdel rocks as a comic artist for over 20 years.
This book is a huge, surprising, candid, funny, serious, revealing slice of her real (you-can't-make-this-stuff-up) life. (and the art is so pleasant)
If you like this kind of work, spend the ten bucks, you won't be sorry. PS
try to read it without reading about the story/plot in a review, the story really twists and turns and all that will be lost if you hear about it in some blunt summary!
Entertaining, deep, great inclusion of literary and mythical refernces:
I was required to read this novel for my Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgendered experience course. I loved the graphics, her choice in detail gives the reader additional information that just what is discussed, and adds to the overall emotional effect. She chose an interesting organization, the novel moves through different memories and still retains a focus. She infuses her writing with literary and mythical references which contribute meaning and entertain. This was the first graphic novel I have read, as... more info
Picture Imperfect:
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... more info
