Description: Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and funny, readers are drawn into a daughters complex yearning for her father. Apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books.
Brief description:
Alison Bechdel's cult following for her early comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For expanded wildly for her family memoirs, the New York Times bestselling and Time magazine #1 Book of the Year graphic memoir Fun Home, adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical, and Are You My Mother? Most recently, The Secret to Superman Strength was named a New York Times Best Graphic Novel of 2021. Bechdel has been named a MacArthur Fellow, among many other honors.
Review Quotes:
"The great writing of the twenty-first century may well be found in graphic novels and nonfiction....Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is an astonishing advertisement for this emerging literary form." - USA Today
"Graphic storytelling at its most profound." - Los Angeles Times, Favorite Book of the Year
"A splendid autobiography...refreshingly open and generous." - Entertainment Weekly
"Fun Home must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced. . . .pioneering." - New York Times Book Review
"A masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other." - Time Magazine
"A splendid autobiography...refreshingly open and generous." --Entertainment Weekly "Fun Home must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced. . . . pioneering." --The New York Times Book Review "A masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other." --Time Magazine "Graphic storytelling at its most profound." --Los Angeles Times, Favorite Book of the Year "The great writing of the twenty-first century may well be found in graphic novels and nonfiction....Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is an astonishing advertisement fro this emerging literary form." --USA Today "Brilliant and bittersweet." --The Boston Globe "Beautiful combines the mundane with the macabre, adding doses of wry, poignant humor on every page." --Washington Post "One of the best memoirs of the decade ... at once hypercontrolled and utterly intimate." --New York Magazine, Best Books of the Year "A revelation ... feels like a true literary achievement, something with characters who baffle and disappoint and break hears the way people do in life and in the best of prose." --Minneapolis Star-Tribune "If David Sedaris could draw, and if Bleak House had been a little funnier, you'd have Alison Bechdel's Fun Home." --Amy Bloom, author of A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You "Alison Bechdel - she's one of the best, one to watch out for." --Harvey Pekar "Masterful...an enormously successful work." --Village Voice "A staggeringly literate and revealing autobiography." --Seattle Times "Brave and forthright and insightful--exactly what Alison Bechdel does best." --Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina "Stupendous...mesmerizing...The details...are devastatingly captured by an artist in total control of her craft." --Chip Kidd, author of The Cheese Monkeys "[Alison Bechdel] hits notes that resemble Jeanette Winterson at her best...She's made a story that's quiet [and] dignified." --Publishers Weekly, Starred "[With] uncommon richness [and] depth...[Fun Home] shares as much in spirit with...other contemporary memoirists of considerable literary accomplishment." --Kirkus Reviews, Starred "One of the very best graphic novels ever." --Booklist, ALA, Starred Review