Larger	Fun Home : A Family Tragicomic Author: Alison Bechdel
	Book Information Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Book Type: Hardcover Members Wishing: 56 Rating: 29 ISBN-13: 9780618477944 - ISBN-10: 0618477942 Publication Date: 6/8/2006 Pages: 240 Book Reviews

This breakout book by Alison Bechdel takes its place alongside the
unnerving, memorable, darkly funny family memoirs of Augusten
Burroughs and Mary Karr. It"s a father-daughter tale pitch-perfectly
illustrated with Bechdel"s sweetly gothic drawings and—like Marjane
Satrapi"s Persepolis—a story exhilaratingly suited to the graphic
memoir form.

Meet Alison"s father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive
restorer of the family"s Victorian house, a third-generation funeral
home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent,
and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with male
students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately
heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we 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. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself
in late adolescence, the denouement is swift . . . graphic . . . and
redemptive.