Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Description

The bestselling memoir from a cult favourite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books.Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, the New York Times, and People. DISCOVER the BESTSELLING GRAPHIC MEMOIR behind the 2019 Olivier Award nominated musical. 'A sapphic graphic treat' The Times A moving and darkly humorous family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Alison Bechdel's gothic drawings. If you liked Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis you'll love this. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high-school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and the family babysitter. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive. Interweaving between childhood memories, college life and present day, and through narrative that is equally heartbreaking and fiercely funny, Alison looks back on her complex relationship with her father and finds they had more in common than she ever knew. 'A groundbreaking masterpiece' The Independent 'A finely woven blend of yearning and euphoric fantasy' Evening Standard **ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

Alison Bechdel is the author of the bestselling memoir Fun Home- A Family Tragicomic and, most recently, Are You My Mother? For twenty-five years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life - queer and otherwise - considered 'one of the pre-eminent oeuvres in the comics genre.' Alison Bechdel is guest editor of Best American Comics, 2011, and has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney's, Entertainment Weekly, Granta, and the New York Times Book Review.

Fun Home and Are You My Mother? are the kind of head-spinningly thoughtful and textured works that make you rejoice in the comic-book form. * Daily Telegraph * Bulging with literary allusions from Proust to Scott Fitzgerald, Fun Home is a book that demands to be read again and again. * Royal Academy Magazine * It is 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... A comic book for lovers of words! 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 * New York Times * Bechdel's memoir offers a graphic narrative of uncommon richness, depth, literary resonance and psychological complexity . . . shares [much] in spirit with the work of Mary Karr, Tobias Wolff, and other contemporary memoirists of considerable literary accomplishement * Kirkus Reviews * The recursively told story, which revisits the sites of tragic desperation again and again, hits notes that resemble Jeanette Winterson at her best... She's made a story that's quiet, dignified and not easy to put down * Publishers Weekly *