Product Code Database
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a 2006 Graphic novel memoir by the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, author of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. It chronicles the author's childhood and youth in rural Pennsylvania, United States, focusing on her complex relationship with her father. The book addresses themes of sexual orientation, , suicide, emotional abuse, dysfunctional family life, and the role of literature in understanding oneself and one's family.
Writing and illustrating Fun Home took seven years, in part because of Bechdel's laborious artistic process, which includes photographing herself in poses for each human figure. Print edition only. Fun Home has been the subject of numerous academic publications in areas such as biography studies and cultural studies as part of a larger turn towards serious academic investment in the study of comics/sequential art.e.g. Tolmie, Jane (2009). "Modernism, Memory and Desire: Queer Cultural Production in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home." Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. 22: 77–96;
Fun Home has been both a popular and critical success, and spent two weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. In The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Sean Wilsey called it "a pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics and memoir) in multiple new directions." Several publications named Fun Home as one of the best books of 2006; it was also included in several lists of the best books of the 2000s. It was nominated for several awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and three (winning the Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work). A French translation of Fun Home was serialized in the newspaper Libération; the book was an official selection of the Angoulême International Comics Festival and has been the subject of an academic conference in France. Fun Home also generated controversy, being challenged and removed from libraries due to its contents.
In 2013, a musical adaptation of Fun Home at The Public Theater enjoyed multiple extensions to its run, with book and lyrics written by Obie Award-winning playwright Lisa Kron, and score composed by Tony Award-nominated Jeanine Tesori. The production, directed by Sam Gold, was called "the first mainstream musical about a young lesbian." As a musical theatre piece, Fun Home was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, while winning the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Musical, and the Obie Award for Musical Theater. The Broadway theatre opened in April 2015 and earned twelve nominations at the 69th Tony Awards, winning the Tony Award for Best Musical.
Fun Home is drawn in black line art with a gray-blue ink wash. Sean Wilsey wrote that Fun Homes panels "combine the detail and technical proficiency of Robert Crumb with a seriousness, emotional complexity and innovation completely its own." Writing in the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Diane Ellen Hamer contrasted "Bechdel's habit of drawing her characters very simply and yet distinctly" with "the attention to detail that she devotes to the background, those TV shows and posters on the wall, not to mention the intricacies of the funeral home as a recurring backdrop." Bechdel told an interviewer for The Comics Journal that the richness of each panel of Fun Home was very deliberate:
Bechdel wrote and illustrated Fun Home over a seven-year period. Her meticulous artistic process made the task of illustration slow. She began each page by creating a framework in Adobe Illustrator, on which she placed the text and drew rough figures. She used extensive photo reference and, for many panels, posed for each human figure herself, using a digital camera to record her poses. Bechdel also used photo reference for background elements. For example, to illustrate a panel depicting fireworks seen from a Greenwich Village rooftop on July 4, 1976, she used Google Images to find a photograph of the New York skyline taken from that particular building in that period. She also painstakingly copied by hand many family photographs, letters, local maps and excerpts from her own childhood journal, incorporating these images into her narrative. After using the reference material to draw a tight framework for the page, Bechdel copied the line art illustration onto plate finish Bristol board for the final inked page, which she then scanned into her computer. The gray-blue ink wash for each page was drawn on a separate page of watercolor paper, and combined with the inked image using Photoshop. Bechdel chose the bluish wash color for its flexibility, and because it had "a bleak, elegiac quality" which suited the subject matter.Emmert, pp. 47–48. Print edition only. Bechdel attributes this detailed creative process to her "barely controlled obsessive-compulsive disorder".Emmert, p. 45. Print edition only.
The memoir focuses on Bechdel's family, and is centered on her relationship with her father, Bruce. Bruce was a funeral director and high school English studies teacher in Beech Creek, where Alison and her siblings grew up. The book's title comes from the family nickname for the funeral home, the family business in which Bruce grew up and later worked; the phrase also refers ironically to Bruce's tyrannical domestic rule. Bruce's two occupations are reflected in Fun Homes focus on death and literature.
In the beginning of the book, the memoir exhibits Bruce's obsession with restoring the family's Victorian home. His obsessive need to restore the house is connected to his emotional distance from his family, which he expressed in coldness and occasional bouts of abusive rage.Bechdel, Fun Home, pp. 11, 18, 21, 68–69, 71. This emotional distance, in turn, is connected with his being a the closet homosexual. Bruce had homosexual relationships in the military and with his high school students; some of those students were also family friends and babysitters.Bechdel, Fun Home, pp. 58–59, 61, 71, 79, 94–95, 120. At the age of 44, two weeks after his wife requested a divorce, he stepped into the path of an oncoming Sunbeam Bread truck and was killed.Bechdel, Fun Home, pp. 27–30, 59, 85. Although the evidence is equivocal, Alison concludes that her father died by suicide.Bechdel, Fun Home, pp. 23, 27–29, 89, 116–117, 125, 232.
The story also deals with Alison's own struggle with her sexual identity, reaching a catharsis in the realization that she is a lesbian and her coming out to her parents.Bechdel, Fun Home, pp. 58, 74–81, The memoir frankly examines her sexual development, including transcripts from her childhood diary, anecdotes about masturbation, and tales of her first sexual experiences with her girlfriend, Joan.Bechdel, Fun Home, pp. 76, 80–81, 140–143, 148–149, 153, 157–159, 162, 168–174, 180–181, 183–186, 207, 214–215, 224. In addition to their common homosexuality, Alison and Bruce share obsessive-compulsive tendencies and artistic leanings, albeit with opposing aesthetic senses: "I was to my father's Athenian. Modernism to his Victorian. Butch to his nelly. Utilitarian to his aestheticism."Bechdel, Fun Home, p. 15. This opposition was a source of tension in their relationship, as both tried to express their dissatisfaction with their given : "Not only were we inverts, we were inversions of each other. While I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him, he was attempting to express something feminine through me. It was a war of cross-purposes, and so doomed to perpetual escalation."Bechdel, Fun Home, p. 98. However, shortly before Bruce's death, he and his daughter have a conversation in which Bruce confesses some of his sexual history; this is presented as a partial resolution to the conflict between father and daughter.Bechdel, Fun Home, pp. 220–221.
At several points in the book, Bechdel questions whether her decision to come out as a lesbian was one of the triggers for her father's suicide.Bechdel, Fun Home, pp. 57–59, 86, 117, 230–232. This question is never answered definitively, but Bechdel closely examines the connection between her father's closeted sexuality and her own open lesbianism, revealing her debt to her father in both positive and negative lights.
In addition to sexual orientation, the memoir touches on the theme of gender identity. Bechdel had viewed her father as "a big sissy"Bechdel, Fun Home, p. 97 while her father constantly tried to change his daughter into a more feminine person throughout her childhood.
The underlying theme of death is also portrayed. Unlike most young people, the Bechdel children have a tangible relationship with death because of the family mortuary business. Alison ponders whether her father's death was an accident or suicide, and finds it more likely that he killed himself purposefully.Bechdel, Fun Home, pp. 27–29.
The chapter headings, too, are all literary allusions. The first chapter, "Old Father, Old Artificer", refers to a line in James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the second, "A Happy Death", invokes the Camus novel. "That Old Catastrophe" is a line from Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning", and "In the Shadow of the Young Girls in Flower" is the literal translation of the title of one of the volumes of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, which is usually given in English as Within a Budding Grove.
In addition to the literary allusions which are explicitly acknowledged in the text, Bechdel incorporates visual allusions to television programs and other items of popular culture into her artwork, often as images on a television in the background of a panel. These visual references include the film It's a Wonderful Life, Bert and Ernie of Sesame Street, the Smiley Face, Yogi Bear, Batman, the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, the resignation of Richard Nixon and The Flying Nun.Bechdel, Fun Home, pp. 10–11 ( It's a Wonderful Life), 14 ( Sesame Street), 15 (Smiley Face), 92 (Yogi Bear), 130 ( Batman), 174–175 (Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote), 181 (Nixon), 131, 193 ( The Flying Nun).
Valerie Rohy, an English professor at the University of Vermont, questions the authenticity of Alison's archives in the book. Rohy explores how Alison uses her diary in her childhood and readings in her young adulthood to both document her life and learn about herself through written works. On the uncertainty relating to Bruce's cause of death, Rohy says Alison concludes it to be a suicide to fill in her knowledge gap of the situation, similar to her use of books to fill in gaps in her own understanding of her childhood.
Judith Kegan Gardiner, a professor of English and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago, views Fun Home as queer literature that bends the literary norms of the graphic novel genre,Judith Kegan Gardiner, Queering Genre: Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, Contemporary Women's Writing, Volume 5, Issue 3, November 2011, Pages 188–207, arguing Bechdel combines both tragedy, normally associated with men, and humor, normally associated with women, by discussing her father's death using a comic book style and dark humor. Gardiner argues Bechdel takes control of creating an open culture for lesbian feminist work through Fun Home by focusing less on Bruce's wrongdoings regarding minors, and more on the tragedy faced by Alison and the guilt towards his subsequent death after her coming out. She also says that by breaking the gender norms of the genre, particularly within lesbian and gay literature, Fun Home has dramatically affected representation.
In the summer of 2006, a French translation of Fun Home was serialized in the Paris newspaper Libération (which had previously serialized Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi). This translation, by Corinne Julve and Lili Sztajn, was subsequently published by Éditions Denoël on October 26, 2006. In January 2007, Fun Home was an official selection of the Angoulême International Comics Festival. In the same month, the English language Studies department of the Université François Rabelais, Tours sponsored an academic conference on Bechdel's work, with presentations in Paris and Tours. At this conference, papers were presented examining Fun Home from several perspectives: as containing "trajectories" filled with tension; as a text interacting with images as a paratext; and as a search for meaning using drag as a metaphor. These papers and others on Bechdel and her work were later published in the peer-reviewed journal GRAAT ( Groupe de Recherches Anglo-Américaines de Tours, or Tours Anglo-American Research Group).
An Italian translation was published by Rizzoli in January 2007. In Brazil, Conrad Editora published a Portuguese translation in 2007. A German translation was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in January 2008. The book has also been translated into Hungarian, Korean, and Polish, and a Chinese translation has been scheduled for publication.
In Spring 2012, Bechdel and literary scholar Hillary Chute co-taught a course at the University of Chicago titled "Lines of Transmission: Comics and Autobiography".
Several publications listed Fun Home as one of the best books of 2006, including The New York Times, Amazon.com, The Times of London, New York magazine and Publishers Weekly, which ranked it as the best comic book of 2006. Salon.com named Fun Home the best nonfiction debut of 2006, admitting that they were fudging the definition of "debut" and saying, " Fun Home shimmers with regret, compassion, annoyance, frustration, pity and love—usually all at the same time and never without a pervasive, deeply literary irony about the near-impossible task of staying true to yourself, and to the people who made you who you are." Entertainment Weekly called it the best nonfiction book of the year, and Time named Fun Home the best book of 2006, describing it as "the unlikeliest literary success of 2006" and "a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other."
Fun Home was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award, in the memoir/autobiography category. In 2007, Fun Home won the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Comic Book, the Stonewall Book Award for non-fiction, the Publishing Triangle-Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award, and the Lambda Literary Award in the "Lesbian Memoir and Biography" category. Fun Home was nominated for the 2007 in two categories, Best Reality-Based Work and Best Graphic Album, and Bechdel was nominated as Best Writer/Artist. Fun Home won the Eisner for Best Reality-Based Work. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly placed Fun Home at No. 68 in its list of "New Classics" (defined as "the 100 best books from 1983 to 2008"). The Guardian included Fun Home in its series "1000 novels everyone must read", noting its "beautifully rendered" details.
In 2009, Fun Home was listed as one of the best books of the previous decade by The Times of London, Entertainment Weekly and Salon.com, and as one of the best comic books of the decade by The Onions A.V. Club. Listed as No. 42 of 100.
Listed as No. 7 of 10.
Listed chronologically in a list of 10 non-fiction works.
Listed alphabetically in a list of 25.
In 2010, the Los Angeles Times literary blog "Jacket Copy" named Fun Home as one of "20 classic works of gay literature". In 2019, the graphic novel was ranked 33rd on The Guardians list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. In 2024, The New York Times ranked it #35 of the 100 best books of the 21st century.
College provost George Hynd and associate provost Lynne Ford defended the choice of Fun Home, pointing out that its themes of identity are especially appropriate for college freshmen. However, seven months later, the Republican-led South Carolina House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee cut the college's funding by $52,000, the cost of the summer reading program, to punish the college for selecting Fun Home. Rep. Garry Smith, who proposed the cuts, said that in choosing Fun Home the university was "promoting the gay and lesbian lifestyle". Rep. Stephen Goldfinch, another supporter of the cuts, said, "This book trampled on freedom of conservatives. ... Teaching with this book, and the pictures, goes too far." Bechdel called the funding cut "sad and absurd" and pointed out that Fun Home "is after all about the toll that this sort of small-mindedness takes on people's lives." The full state House of Representatives subsequently voted to retain the cuts. College of Charleston students and faculty reacted with dismay and protests to the proposed cuts, and the college's Student Government Association unanimously passed a resolution urging that the funding be restored. A coalition of ten free-speech organizations wrote a letter to the South Carolina Senate Finance Committee, urging them to restore the funds and warning them that "penalising state educational institutions financially simply because members of the legislature disapprove of specific elements of the educational program is educationally unsound and constitutionally suspect". The letter was co-signed by the National Coalition Against Censorship, the ACLU of South Carolina, the American Association of University Professors, the Modern Language Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the Association of American Publishers, the National Council of Teachers of English and the American Library Association. After a nearly week-long debate in which Fun Home and Bechdel were compared to slavery, Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler, the state Senate voted to restore the funding, but redirect the funds towards study of the United States Constitution and The Federalist Papers; the university was also required to provide alternate books to students who object to an assignment due to a "religious, moral or cultural belief". Governor Nikki Haley approved the budget measure penalizing the university.
Two other books were also removed from the library by the principal, Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? and Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer.
In August of 2025, the Edmonton Public School Board's internally distributed a list of over 200 books to be removed from library shelves in order to comply with the new policy. The list included literary classics including The Handmaid's Tale, Brave New World, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. When the list was leaked to the public, major backlash ensued forcing the government to pause implementation .
In September 2025, the government announced a revised policy that requires removal of only visual representations deemed sexually explicit. The examples of objectionable materials continue to include Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.
The musical debuted Off-Broadway at The Public Theater on September 30, 2013. The production was directed by Sam Gold and starred Michael Cerveris and Judy Kuhn as Bruce and Helen Bechdel. The role of Alison was played by three actors: Beth Malone played the adult Alison, reviewing and narrating her life, Alexandra Socha played "Medium Alison" as a student at Oberlin, discovering her sexuality, and Sydney Lucas played Small Alison, at age 10. It received largely positive reviews, and its limited run was extended several times until January 12, 2014. The musical was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; it also won the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Musical, and the Obie Award for Musical Theater. Alison Bechdel drew a one-page comic about the musical adaptation for the newspaper Seven Days.
A Broadway theatre production opened at Circle in the Square Theatre in April 2015. The production won five 2015 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and ran for 26 previews and 582 regular performances until September 10, 2016, with a national tour that began in October 2016.Gordon, Jessica Fallon. "Photo Coverage: Fun Home Closes on Broadway with Emotional Final Curtain Call", BroadwayWorld.com, September 11, 2016 Kalle Oskari Mattila, in The Atlantic, argued that the musical's marketing campaign "obfuscates rather than clarifies" the queer narrative of the original novel.Mattila, Kalle Oskari. "Selling Queerness: The Curious Case of Fun Home", The Atlantic, April 25, 2016. Retrieved November 23, 2017
|
|
