Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) is a graphic novel memoir written and illustrated by underground cartoonist Alison Bechdel. The book centers on Bechdel’s relationship with her late father Bruce Allen Bechdel, who died in what she believes was a death by suicide. Fun Home is a non-linear narrative that rehashes events from Alison Bechdel’s youth and adolescence. Her memories are presented in the comic panels, overlayed with her prosaic, retrospective musings in text boxes and captions. Much of Fun Home consists of Bechdel’s adolescent discovery of her homosexuality, which parallels her father’s own closeted queerness. The novel deals with themes of queer sexuality, gender nonconformity, familial dysfunction, artifice, death, and self-exploration.

Fun Home is a highly decorated publication. The New York Times, The Times, New York Magazine, and Publishers Weekly all named it the best comic book of 2006. Entertainment Weekly named it the best nonfiction book of 2006, and Time Magazine named it the best book of 2006. It also garnered numerous awards, including the GLAAD Media Award, the Stonewall Book Award, the Publishing Triangle-Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and an Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work.