Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir about her childhood in rural Pennsylvania, where her family ran a funeral home the children nicknamed "the fun home." At its center is Bechdel's relationship with her father, Bruce — a high school English teacher and funeral director obsessed with restoring the family's ornate Victorian house, and a closeted gay man whose sudden death, weeks after Alison came out to her parents as a lesbian, she comes to believe was suicide.

The book moves nonlinearly, circling back over the same events from different angles as Bechdel pieces together her father's hidden life alongside her own coming of age and coming out. It's built through dense literary allusion — Proust, Joyce, Fitzgerald, and Greek mythology all thread through the narrative as Bechdel searches for language adequate to her father's contradictions and her own.

Widely regarded as one of the defining works of literary graphic memoir, Fun Home is precise, formally ambitious, and unsentimental about grief, sexuality, and the distance between a family's appearance and its reality.