Details
Synopsis
Alison Bechdel, known for the wonderfully funny and politically astute comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, has created an intense, brilliantly crafted memoir about her deeply closeted father in graphic novel format. Bruce Bechdel, a funeral director and English teacher, obsessively restored their 19th-century home, stayed in the confines of the family's rural Pennsylvania town, and much to his daughter's shock, seduced teenage boys. Committing suicide just a few months after Alison came out to the family, she ruminates over the timing, unfolds feelings and thoughts in a series of memories, moving around fluidly in time, with the selective use of letters, diaries, and photographs. Comparing her father to Daedalus, Proust, and Fitzgerald, among others, Bechdel has created a literary-laced examination of familial connections that is piercingly honest. For each panel, she took a digital photograph of herself in position as a resource for the drawings, taking almost 1,000 pictures in all. A 2006 New York Times Notable Book and Time Magazine's #1 book of 2006.
| Size | | Length: | 232 pages | | Height: | 9.3 in | | Width: | 6.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 19.2 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "Like many fathers, mine could occasionally be prevailed on for a spot of 'airplane.' As he launched me, my full weight would fall on the pivot point between his feet and my stomach. It was a discomfort well worth the rare physical contact, and certainly worth the moment of perfect balance when I soared above him."
Industry Reviews
"In this brilliant, bleakly hilarious memoir in comic-book form, [Alison] Bechdel combines stories from her emotionally barren but weirdly fascinating childhood with elegant allusions to Proust and Joyce to make a gripping story of filial sleuthery and, in the end, hard earned acceptance."
(05/29/2006)
"[Alison Bechdel's] language and drawings are impressively sensitive to the details of her physical experience and to the trickier folds of her own self-consciousness; she dives over and over into the cloudy waters of her past, swimming deeper every time....FUN HOME is a beautiful, assured piece of work."
(06/05/2006)
"[A] pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics and memoir) in multiple new directions, with panels that combine the detail and technical proficiency of R. Crumb with a seriousness, emotional complexity and innovation completely its own...Bechdel's rich language and precise images combine to create a lush piece of work--a memoir where concision and detail are melded for maximum, obsessive density."
(06/18/2006)
"FUN HOME...shows how powerfully--and economically--the medium can portray autobiographical narrative...The last chapter of FUN HOME is its most brilliant, and most moving, in part because Bechdel finally surpasses her father: She becomes the artist he always wished he could be. "
(07/11/2006)
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