"Graphic storytelling at its most profound."
Los Angeles Times Book Review, Favorite Books of 2006
"Brilliant and bittersweet."
Boston Globe
"The Graphic Book of the Year is incontestably Alison Bechdel's unflinching, multilayered memoir of growing up in small-town Pennsylvania... A complex love letter not only to her father but also to books and reading, Fun Home is luminescent with wit, lyrical prose, intelligence, honesty, and emotional truth."
Times (London)
"A staggeringly literate and revealing autobiography"
Seattle Times
"The great writing of the twenty-first century may well be found in graphic novels and nonfiction... Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is astonishing advertisement for this emerging literary form."
USA Today
"Brilliant... a gripping story of filial sleuthery."
Time
PUBLIC interaction
"A splendid autobiograpy... generous and intelligent... It has depth and sweetnes few can match."
Entertainment Weekly
INTERACTION
"Beautifully combines the mundane with the macabre, adding dses of wry, poignant humor on every page."
Washington Post
"Fun Home shimmers with regret, compassion, annoyance, frustration, pity, and love -- usually all at the same time and never without a pervasive, deeply literary irony about the near-impossible task of staying true to yourself and to the people who made you who you are."
Salon.com
"Brilliant...A memoir of riveting honesty and unrivaled texture, and a reading experience you won't soon forget."
Oregonian
BOOK REVIEWS
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Memoir
Winner of the Stonewall Book Award -- Israel Fish Nonfiction Award
Finalist for the Quill Award in Graphic Narrative
RECOGNITION
Double finalist for the Lambda Book Award
Nominated for the GLAAD Media Award and the Book Sense Book of the Year Award
Ranked a National Bestseller in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Book Sense, and more
PERSONAL interaction
While Bechdel was very familiar with the characters she was portraying in her comics, the process of recreating them on paper proved to require a rather intimate process of interaction with the material. In this video, Bechdel gives a synopsis of her methodology in creating the images that have received so much acclaim.
In addition to her methods for creating the images, Bechdel also gave a note on the necessity of these images in an interview with The Comics Journal. Bechdel said basically that the novel became like an addendum to her years of
ILLUSTRATIONS
counseling, where she learned "a psychoanalytic way of thinking" that helped her interpret her life as if it was a dream. She then added that she learned this way of thinking "even to the extent that dreams are kind of visual language, and I don't think I could have told this story without images. That was part of my syntax."
WRITING
Bechdel worked on Fun Home for about seven years. As she shared in her interview with Lynn Emmert from The Comics Journal, this lengthy period was both necessary for personal growth and healing as well as for professional success.
Also in this interview, Bechdel described her process of creating this piece as slow and methodical, adding, "I don't know how else you would do this stuff. You not only have to write it, you have to do all this painstaking drawing, and then you have to do design work, and it's just all-consuming." With this insight, Bechdel expresses a bit of her interaction with the
text and the creative process through which her story came to life.
In addition to the logistics of creating Fun Home, though, Bechdel also had to deal with the emotional foundation that existed with the story. She described her experience of creating it as very "emotionally tumultuous" when she discussed her family's reaction to the graphic novel. Interestingly, despite the challenge that this posed, Bechdel still continued in her pursuit of the novel, which fortifies her claims about being open and honest about her sexuality and life experiences.