Paul Bryant
THIS JUST IN P BRYANT FAILS HIP GRAPHIC NOVEL TESTFun Home a cripplingly hip graphic novel isYes?It'sYES??Well let's see it's you know all right good yes nods head hummphs into beard pulls earlobe raises eyebrows waves hands in a vague direction shifts about in seat You know Don't get me wrong It was good Yes Cool clever really hip I mean really as far as I can tell my hipometer needs a new battery I think; it was not the least bit funny but that's not such a bad thing andStares at ceilingHas sudden thoughtHey you don't think Alison Bechdel will read this do you she's not one of those Goodreads authors who suddenly jump up like a damned jack in a box and scare the jesus out of you and tell you they devoted five years of hard graft to this work you've just or less sneered at and damned wi.. (Sign in to see more)
Meg Powers
Reading Fun Home A Family Tragicomic put me in the same irritated and impatient mood experienced when reading Toni Morrison's The Song of Solomon in high school both books feel like major wank offs to the writers' cumulative reading endeavors To put it in less crude terms both books overflow with self conscious references to classic literature both use The Odyssey in a major way However this is not a review of The Song of Solomon so I suppose I will set aside that grudge for nowThis is how I feel any person no matter how mediocre hisher life might be perceived can be made into a great story The key to this is good writing and although Bechdel's writing is ORNAMENTAL it's not engaging She doesn't make me care about her and I care only a little bit about her dad whom the book focuses on The .. (Sign in to see more)
Red dog casino login. Emily
Having never felt much inclination toward the graphic novel genre I accepted a copy of Fun Home by Alison Bechdel on loan only because a coworker promised that I could finish it in one hour and forty minutes almost precisely the amount of time it would take to travel from the office to my home in Connecticut where I had plans to spend the weekendOne hour and fifty five minutes later when my mom pulled in her mini van I was close to the end but not there yet I'm a slow reader But Fun Home is also a book that demands patient meticulous study I examined every illustration looking for the visual details that Alison a cartoonist has tucked in here and there Hidden like easter eggs there are amusing details meant to be discovered on particularly grim pages Alison can also make the most simplisti.. (Sign in to see more)
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Patrick
I've known about Bechdel for some time but I've never gotten around to reading any of her work Odds are you know about her too even if you're not aware of it She's the one that invented the appropriately named Bechdel Test for moviesIf you don't know about the test it bears talking about It's almost like a checklist 1 Does the movie have two female characters in it? 2 Do the two female characters have at least one conversation? 3 Does at least one of their conversations concentrate on something other than a man? If the answer to any of these is no you fail the test To me the truly interesting thing about this test isn't how many movies utterly fail it It's that when you're first exposed to the test you're forced to confront how fucked up the gender bias in almost all media is Anyway I pick.. (Sign in to see more)
Fabian
Works doubly as one hugely terrific autobiography a megaengaging graphic novel In FUN HOME there is a tremendous longing to merge both of these Arts The intent is always to make print as compelling as the pictorials they are made to convey Astute cheeky enthralling it brings together disparate themes like 'Wind in the Willows The Importance of Being Earnest and Catcher in the Rye as well as A Chorus Line Joyce's Ulysses pretty much a choose your own literature type adventure that possibly every single reader of this flawless book could relate toTen dollars to you if the last pageframe of this doesn't make you BOLPS We are watching the musical this January Oh blessed New YearBawl Out LoudTOP 100
Larry H
Family dysfunction bow down to the Bechdel familyAlison Bechdel's father Bruce was an enigma to her while she was growing up—an English teacher and director of the family owned funeral home aka the Fun Home who had an exacting eye for fashion decor and gardening He wasn't a bad father but he always seemed to keep her and her brothers at arm's length not to mention her motherWhile Alison remembered some special tender times she remembered moments of being forced to wear an outfit she didn't want scolded into meeting his tough cleaning standards and feeling bewildered at his obsession with making sure all of the flowers around their house always looked perfectWhen Alison was in college she came out to her parents as a lesbian Shortly thereafter she found out that her father was gay While .. (Sign in to see more)
Elyse Walters
Many Thanks to Margaret who recommended this book to meWOWI knew NOTHING about this book TERRIFIC SPECTACULAR until it was in my hands todayother than it was a highly recognized graphic memoir chosen best book of the year by at least 10 major publications in 200680 4333 people rated this book so where was I? Hidden away with blindfolds and earplugs? There's a lot going on in this 'memoir' so much so there could be several individual books written on any 'one' theme For 18 years Allison grew up in a house of daily renovation If anybody has lived through having their bathroom or kitchen remodeled you know personally what the disruption feels like Can you imagine your entire childhood around hammers and nails strips of loose molding? Remodeling is very stressful I would think that many years .. (Sign in to see more)
Nat
This graphic memoir has been on my to read list for what feels like ages so I felt entirely satisfied when I completed reading itIn this graphic memoir Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late fatherDistant and exacting Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home which Alison and her family referred to as the Fun Home It was not until college that Alison who had recently come out as a lesbian discovered that her father was also gay A few weeks after this revelation he was dead leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolveIn the end I was compelled to pick up Fun Home completely on a whim Though I flew through it a lot of the literary references went shamefully over my head And considering that it was such a big focus here I was l.. (Sign in to see more)
Samadrita
355 Fun Home's biggest flaw is its self conscious droll narrative voice that diminishes its raw earnestness at times Alison Bechdel imposes her obsessive compulsive desire for extracting meaning from even the most commonplace of occurrences on to a narrative of coming to terms with personal loss And this whole exercize of drawing parallels between fictional and real life tragedies and pivotal emotional beats becomes too trite all too soon Maybe she should have known when to put the kibosh on this thingBut it's okay Since I understand wherefrom this monomaniacal urge originates It's hard to make sense of a father's death especially at an age when you were only just learning how to peel off layers of pretensions obfuscating the unadulterated reality that lay at the core of his personhood It'.. (Sign in to see more)
David Schaafsma
I just re read Fun Home A Family Tragicomic for my class on YA Graphic Novels with strong girl characters A celebrated memoir made into a Tony award winning musical One of the best comics projects of all time Meticulously wrought with attention to every single detail in every single panel this memoir reveals itself fairly early on as a dual coming out story of Bechdel and her father To say when these events take place would be the spoiler in this story than the fact of those admissions To say that it is an accomplished work of art and memorable story is not to say that any of the members of Bechdel's family are warm and inviting; to the contrary the often blisteringly candid tone with which she tells her story reveals that none of the Bechdels are easy to get along with well her brothers .. (Sign in to see more)
Fun Home Cast
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Sexuality (Hidden)
In her memoir, Alison Bechdel writes about the process of discovering that she is attracted to women and coming out to her family at 19. While young Alison faces certain struggles as she attempts to embrace her sexuality, she is able to do so in a supportive community. However, Bruce Bechdel's homosexuality, which arguably forms the emotional core of Fun Home, remains a secret for most of Alison's life. In fact, it is Alison's own coming out that prompts Helen Bechdel to reveal Bruce's hidden affairs to her daughter. The process of writing the memoir has clearly allowed Bechdel to look back at her father through the lens of hindsight, thus giving her the opportunity to uncover hints about her father's hidden sexuality that she was unable to decipher at the time. The scene in which Bruce takes his recently-out daughter to a gay bar embodies the differences between Bruce and Alison's ways of dealing with their homosexuality. Bruce struggles through his shame in an effort to show his daughter some support - something he never had - and Alison tries to connect with her father on the basis of their shared proclivites. Ultimately, the chasm between their experiences leads the bonding moment to fall short of Alison's hopes - Bruce's shame is too deep for him to truly reveal himself to his daughter.
Death
House Of Fun Free Coins
The traumatic moment of Bruce Bechdel's death is a mystery to his daughter, since the only witness is the truck driver who hit him. Nevertheless, Alison and her mother assume Bruce's death was a suicide - connected somehow to his latent homosexuality and Helen's request for a divorce. Even before her father's passing, death is a constant presence in Alison Bechdel's life because she grows up around the funeral home (from which the book gets its name, Fun Home). Bechdel underlines the fact that she has always had an unexpected reaction to death - she is indifferent upon seeing her first corpse and can only feel irritation in the wake of Bruce's passing. Therefore, by writing about Bruce's death so early in Fun Home, Bechdel uses the process of writing and illustrating to unpack her complicated emotions about her father's demise.
Gender Identity
Bechdel's gender identity is closely linked to her sexuality, since she discovers her affinity for men's clothing alongside her attraction to women. She first experiments with cross-dressing in high school while dancing with her friend Beth - a memory that stands out in her mind as a major turning point. Likewise, Bechdel reflects on her father's effeminate tendencies; she ruminates that his suppression of these urges is why Bruce would go out of his way to enforce femininity upon Alison in the form of dresses and barrettes that she never wanted to wear. This thread culminates with Bruce's eventual revelation that when he was a child, he wanted to be a girl and dressed in girls' clothing, to which 20-year-old Alison responds, 'I wanted to be a boy! I dressed in boys' clothes!' (221).
Understanding Life Through Literarature
Bechdel uses allusions to literature throughout Fun Home - both as a narrator and as a character - as a way of analyzing and making sense of her memories. The chapter titles, the very framework of her non-linear narrative, are all references to works of (mostly modernist) literature that have influenced Bechdel over the course of her life. 'Old Father, Old Artificer' is a line from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 'A Happy Death' is the title of Albert Camus's existential novel. 'That Old Catastrophe' is a line in Wallace Stevens's 'Sunday Morning.' 'In the Shadow of the Young Girls in Flower' is a translation of the title of the second volume of Marcel Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time.' 'The Canary-Colored Caravan of Death' is a reference to Kenneth Grahame's children's novel The Wind in the Willows. 'The Ideal Husband' invokes Oscar Wilde's 1895 comedic stage play of the same name. 'The Anti-Hero's Journey' is a reference to Joyce again, this time to Bloom, the anti-hero of Ulysses.
Artifice
The pattern of presenting a face to the world that is, in fact, masking a darker reality permeates Bechdel's memoir. It is evident in the character of Bruce Bechdel, within whom the theme of artifice is closely linked with the theme of secret sexuality. It is also embodied by the Bechdel family's Gothic revival mansion, which gives the impression of a happy, wealthy home, when in reality, the family living inside it is tormented in many ways.
Art as a Replacement for Life
In addition to setting up elaborate literary metaphors, Bechdel often suggests that life imitates and can even be usurped by art. For example, in 'Old Father, Old Artificer,' a neatly framed drawing of the author and her brothers around the Christmas tree with her father's shadowy figure in the foreground looking on is labeled, 'A sort of still life with children' (14). In his letters to Helen and to Alison, Bruce Bechdel often compares himself to the characters in whichever book he is reading. In this way, this theme is linked to that of understanding life through literature. The difference between Alison's approach and Bruce's, however, is that while she uses literature as a tool to represent and cope with her relationships, he seems to prefer fiction to reality.
Drawings of Words
Bechdel often reveals information to the reader through her drawings; ironically, many of these drawings are of words written in a novel, a letter, a newspaper, the author's diary, or even the dictionary. By making a conscious effort to represent these words as they appear in other sources, Bechdel creates distance between herself as an author and as a character. The reader feels as though he or she is reading the words in their original format and thus forming an interpretation alongside the character of Alison Bechdel - as opposed to having the omniscient narrator telling the reader how to feel.
Multiple Meanings
Throughout the memoir, Bechdel uses certain words that represent more than one thing. For example, she describes her father's death as 'queer in every sense of that multi-valent word' (57). She uses the word 'queer' because Bruce is secretly queer, but his death is also queer because of the ambiguous circumstances surrounding it. Even the ironic title of the memoir, Fun Home, may be understood as a reference to a home filled with 'enjoyment, amusement, or lighthearted pleasure.' However, only those who read the memoir will understand that Bechdel is using 'fun' as a shortened form of 'funeral.'
