Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Alison Bechdel
Houghton Mifflin
Cartoonist Alison Bechdel of Dykes to Watch Out For fame wrote and illustrated this story, an autobiographical account of the relationship between a girl and her father. The memoir of Bechdel’s childhood in Pennsylvania recalls, jumping through a fractured chronology, her burgeoning homosexuality and her parent’s repression. He taught English, threw himself into restoring the family Victorian, was a funeral director—the book title comes from the part of the house where he worked—and struggled with being gay. The book’s bittersweet account reveal moments of cross-generational understanding, but also moments lost, never to be recovered.
Carsten Knox
type: graphic novel
category: best of 2006
This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2007.
