Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fun Home | 2006 | Alison Bechdel | Buy |
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, published in 2006, is Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir about growing up in a small Pennsylvania town. Her father, Bruce Bechdel, ran the local funeral home and was an English teacher who obsessed over restoring their Victorian house. After Bechdel came out as a lesbian in college, she learned that her father had been having affairs with men. He died shortly after, hit by a truck in what may have been a suicide.
The memoir uses literary references to James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Oscar Wilde to frame the story of a family that kept secrets from each other and from themselves. Bechdel’s meticulous black-and-white drawings are based on family photographs and careful research into the details of her childhood home. The book spent two weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was named Time magazine’s number one book of 2006.