Reviews with content warning for Sexual content - Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

85 reviews

courn's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny hopeful reflective medium-paced

3.75

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gussurireads's review

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challenging emotional funny medium-paced

5.0

I was drawn to this because Bechdel is famous for, well, the Bechdel test, and as a queer woman who loves stories centered on women and their relationships with other women, that test is very important to me.

So I went in completely blind. Mind you, I am fan of graphic novels. I don't read a lot of memoirs, though. But Alison Bechdel writes and draws a compelling, honest and yes, at times pretentious, story of her bizarre family, drawing parallels between herself, an out and proud lesbian, to her closeted, deeply repressed father.

It's not the kind of graphic novel that you breeze through in a couple of hours. It took me a few days of carefully going through this and still there's so many references that eluded me, what with me not being an English major or a very cultured reader (I enjoy my fantasy, ok?)

Still, so much of Allison's story resonated with me, as most queer stories do. The act of discovering a new part of ourselves, coming to terms with it, rejoicing in this newfound identity, is quite possible the most universal queer experience of them all, and Bechdel is a master at embellishing her own experience. Like father, like daughter, indeed.

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teddybo's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

4.0

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ehwesson's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad medium-paced

4.0

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babbieabbi's review against another edition

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challenging sad medium-paced

3.5

I really feel for Alison and all the other people depicted in this book. She clearly has very complex feelings about her family, and it definitely makes me reflect on my own family dynamics. Although there are many many differences, the mixed emotions are portrayed extremely well.

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haileyhardcover's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense slow-paced

I don’t know how to rate this book, so I simply will not. Did I enjoy reading it? No, not particularly. It is awkward, painful, and unnecessarily sesquipedalian. Is it also incredible? Undoubtedly, yes.

The amount of TIME that must’ve gone into writing - or more specifically DRAWING - all of this is mind blowing. With a cursory glance, one might look at Bechdel’s artistic style and think it unoriginal - similar to so many other comics we’ve seen before. But I beg you to look longer. Look at the detail; not in EVERY panel, but so many of them. Look at all of the WORDS. There are so many words - beyond the captions and the speech/thought ballons, so often the art of the panels themselves are just words - snippets from letters, journals, books, newspapers, court records, or the dictionary… and it’s all hand drawn?! I can’t begin to imagine how much time this would take…

Fun Home is not fun. I cannot say I enjoyed reading it, but I also absolutely cannot deny that it’s a masterpiece. I have no idea how they could’ve turned this into a musical…

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