About this title: Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, readers are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books.
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Description: Very good. Appearance of only slight previous use. Cover and binding show a little wear. All pages are undamaged with potentially only a few, small markings. Help save a tree. Buy all your used books from Green Earth Books. Read. Recycle and Reuse! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9780618477944ISBN:0618477942
Description: Acceptable. -Acceptable: A readable copy. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact (the dust cover may be missing). Pages can include considerable notes--in pen or highlighter--but the notes cannot obscure the text. About Austin eBooks Austin eBooks is committed to providing each customer with the highest standard of customer service! We add inventory to our store daily, and guarantee order processing and shipment within 2 business days. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9780618477944ISBN:0618477942
Description: Good. Good condition overall minor shelf wear sharp corners tight spine All new inventory received to basement All orders guaranteed and ship within 24 hours. Your purchase supports More Than Words, a nonprofit job training program for youth, empowering youth to take charge of their lives by taking charge of a business. read more
Description: Good in Good jacket. 0618477942 This book has some shelf wear as well as marks on the cover and pages. This book is 232 pages of a comic book style memoir. read more
Description: Good. Used-Good. May contain highlighting/underlining/notes/etc. May have used stickers on cover. Ships same or next day. Expedited shipping takes 2-3 business days; standard shipping takes 4-14 business days. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9780618477944ISBN:0618477942
Description: Near Fine/Near Fine. Fine. 232 pp. like new/like new, last pg. and back free end pg are dog-eared top edge (seems accidental or in printing run), book is clean and solid. INTERNATIONAL CUSTOMERS PLEASE CALCULATE APPROPRIATE SHIPPING COSTS BEFORE PURCHASE 232 pp. like new/like new, last pg. and back free end pg are dog-eared top edge (seems accidental or in printing run), book is clean and solid. read more
"You know, I thought this book couldn't possibly be as good as I remembered it. But it really really is. It is exquisitely paced and laid out and drawn and balances Bechdel's story with her father's very well. And yes, it is maybe a little snobbily literary (Camus, Proust, Anais Nin, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Wilde off the top of my head) but it is essential to the nature of the characters.
So two of the basic themes are important ones. First: family and memory. She makes it clear that her dad was intolerable a lot of the time, but also that there was a lot of good in him and you couldn't really take one without the other. She doesn't absolve him or condemn him and it is such a fine line that I think she walks it really well. Fun Home is both critical of and sentimental about parents with obvious flaws and great passions. Which is perfect - because that's pretty much how life is.
Second: Sexuality and self-discovery, I think? She's a little bit less expertly ambivalent on this, but that's ok. Her coming-out process is a literary one, and that's cool. The responses of her parents to her coming out is fascinating -- it is nice that she shows her mom's response:- "my life is tied firmly at this time to family and work, and I see your choice as a threat to both of these." Her mom got a pretty raw deal, and I am glad we get some of her story.
Addendum: On further reflection, I think she (unintentionally, maybe} expresses the initial sense of bravery/idealism of people who act on their gay leanings, and how, ultimately, that life is not going to be all roses and sunshine, making that choice is not a panacea. It is all tied up in the rest of your life, and your family even, no matter what you'd like to think. That's what this book says to me. But probably not to everybody.
The literary courtship of her parents is quite nice, and all the typewritten letters between their family make me miss my typewriter alot. But yep, I think it's a must-read for anyone who has ever had parents or had a sexuality or liked books. There you go."
"How did I not rate this earlier!? Grim self-conscious brilliance, of course. Something over which to pore in every frame (maybe, at moments, too much?). Gluey and intrinsic references to Proust, James, Fitzgerald. Funnier than Six Feet Under, plottier than The L Word, most anguished when it's simple and image-based. I've been crushed out on Bechdel since 1992 and this book didn't help. Read it immediately."
"I would have given this graphic memoir about Alison Bechdel's secretly gay dad, who happened to be a funeral home director, seven stars if I could have! It is probably the best I've ever read, so sensitively drawn, funny, literary, and with a lovely story structure. Just amazing all around."
"I had some mixed reactions to the this book, a memoir of growing up with a closeted father. I thought at times she pushed so hard to connect the goings on in her life to some kind of historical or literary context. Her father was very Proustian, it seems, and her family's life was straight out of In Search of Lost Time, and also some James novels, and Gatsby. But throughout, Bechdel is critical of her need to make these connections. I mean, she's aware of what she's doing, and treats it, in her self-conscious narration, as some kind of tic she can't help. This assuages the obvious manipulation of experience she's got going on.
And then toward the end there's this great moment with Ulysses, which she reads in a winter-term course because it is her father's favorite, and yet slacks behind in class because she has better, more vital reading to do. Which is to say: books by and about lesbians. (Bechdel came out in college.) So I thought this was going to be some inevitable refutation of, like, the patriarchal, "big books" canon that her father somewhat forced on her, but no.
I think I only want to read memoirs in comics form, in the future. The great thing about the form is how economical it is with time. So many pages have panels next to one another that move from Alison as a toddler to Alison as a teen, then back to toddlerhood and then all the up to her near-present self. These sorts of moves would be either incomprehensible, in a written memoir, or so glacially slow and dull if the writer made sure we were following her jumps in time. This way, the comic can work a lot like how our memory works, which is so rarely chronological.
For a while I thought Bechdel's paneling and general structure was really straightforward, not really pushing the form anywhere, until I got to the "climax" of the book (or maybe it is the climax) on pages 220-221. To avoid ruining the "plot" of it, what has been throughout the book a pretty loose and varied style of paneling becomes on these pages this lock-step grid where every image is the same. Just the dialogue changes. It's not only a great mirror to what's going on in that cramped little space of her father's car, but it also works, like I said, as a visual climax, some kind of epiphanic inevitability.
I like it when comic books let their art signal narrative shifts, I guess is what I'm saying."
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