Next time someone tells you "graphic novels aren't REAL literature," hand them this. WOW but Bechdel is one smart lady! On the surface, Bechdel's tragicomic memoir is about her relationship with her father, and about coming out as a lesbian, which she did just before her father's death. But there are so many other layers! Among other things, Bechdel's memoir is jammed packed with literary references. Some, explicit in the narrative, play a strong role in her relationship with and understanding of her father. The illustrations carry other references, including the titles of a plethora of lesbian-feminist literature; familiar to lesbians of an age with Bechdel, and embedded in LGBTQ collective cultural heritage.

I now know why this is considered to be a top memoir in graphic novels. It's dark but also sort of heartbreakingly funny. Worth reading

The author recounts her fraught history with her distant father, who - late in life - she discovered was also gay. Good for fans for warts and all family dramas and awkward holiday dinners.

Alison Bechdel’s book Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a memoir in comics form. It’s mostly about growing up and dealing with her father’s homosexuality (at the same time she was coming out as a lesbian) and his criminal behaviour with some of his students, and his death. Which may have been a suicide.

She doesn’t tell it straightforwardly, but circles around events and brings things back and forth through time echoing dreams the way memory does at its best. It starts with the house her father was constantly renovating. It deals with life in a funeral home. There are neglected dreams and OCD episodes. It’s painful and terrible and everything seems fraught with meaning.

It’s very much a personal story. It’s the kind of story that makes you ask “how do the people she wrote about feel about this?” It’s courageous and self-absorbed in a way I can’t help but admire. Really great work.

I read it because my husband and I saw the musical before we left D.C. I think that was actually the last piece of theatre we saw before we moved. It was a decent performance. At the time, I was struck by the simplicity and strategic repetition of the lyrics. But I've been incredibly impressed how much the songs have stuck with me and how much I've listened to the cast album since.

I think going from the musical to the source material made me appreciate how much liberty Lisa Kron took with Bechdal's work. It was an adaptation and they exist definitively as two different works, yet there is also a way in which they harmonize.

Fun Home has powerful and skillful allusions to literary masterpieces that I am so glad Kron did not try to tackle. It worked incredibly well in print, in part because there was time for Bechdal to do the work to set it up. I think sometimes it felt a little forced, then she would keep pushing and a point or an illustration would just make it resonate and feel worth it.

There is a wit, an honesty, and a willingness to demonstrate beautiful (if not brutal) questions that drives this work. And I will never look at a package of Sunbeam bread again. Seriously, the way she litter that loaf of bread throughout the book is astounding.

This is such a well-written complex & intense​ autobiographical story of the author's coming of age in a dysfunctional family--focused on the father's abusive, but charismatic personality!
This book is a 3-time award winner: Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography, Stonewall Book Awards - Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award and GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Comic Book.

I'm usually not a GN fan but this was hard to put down.

This book showed up on my class reading list, but I hadn't looked anything up about it until I bought it from the bookstore. I wasn't expecting a graphic novel, to say the least, but I was immediately intrigued because of it.
This book recounts the author's life, growing up in a funeral home, discovering her sexuality, and coming to terms with the relationship she had with her late father.
I really liked it. There was no sugar-coating. Only the facts and the raw, unashamed truth were given to the reader. This display of transparent honesty is what, to me, makes this book so likable. You don't feel as though you are being deceived or lulled into a make-believe fantasy land of someone's ideal childhood. You instead feel as though the author is reaching out to you, trying to connect with you in a real, emotional and human way.
The reader follows Alison as she realizes and comes to terms with being a lesbian, as she deals with the sudden and mysterious death of her father, and discovers her father's own sexual preferences.
Amazing book, would recommend to anyone interested.

An autobiography told in graphic novel form. Alison Bechdel's memoir is gritty, funny, heartwarming, and "graphic." The author's wit and humor while reliving her "unconventional" childhood, and her adventures as a young lesbian coming out to her closeted father will reel you in with its' authenticity, and keeps you captivated until the last page.

I really enjoyed this; it was one of the most cerebral things I've read since graduating.
A well-read lesbian's biography which focuses mainly on her father, and her childhood in the 1970s. Turns out that her father was a closeted gay man for her entire upbringing, and not a flamboyantly fun gay man. Author Alison Bechdel's personal narrative is raw and dark, but level headed and very captivating.