Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
by Alison Bechdel
The memoir that made the closet visible.
For you if
you've ever loved someone who was living the wrong life.
⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡
Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.
Buy New on Bookshop.orgSupports independent bookstores
— OR —
Find Used on Better World BooksSecondhand & sustainable
$19 MSRP · Paperback
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.
Alison Bechdel grew up in a Victorian funeral home in small-town Pennsylvania, raised by a father who was a high school English teacher, obsessive restorer of antique furniture, and closeted gay man. Four months after she came out to her parents and her father confirmed he'd had affairs with men, he walked in front of a truck. Whether it was suicide, Bechdel never decides for the reader. Instead she makes a graphic memoir out of it — and the result is one of the great books about the weight of secrets: the ones we keep from ourselves, the ones our parents keep from us, and the ones they take to their graves. Fun Home is structured around a mystery that isn't really a mystery. Bechdel traces the literary architecture of her childhood — her father's obsessive identification with Fitzgerald, Camus, Proust — and maps her own coming of age onto these same texts. She's funnier than she has any right to be given the material. The graphic form gives her distance and precision. And the central question — what does it cost to live in the wrong story? — is answered on every page, in her father's face, in the particular way a closeted man restores a house he can never actually inhabit. Frequently challenged and banned for LGBTQ+ content and 'sexual content' — a characterization that describes maybe five pages of a 240-page memoir. The South Carolina legislature cut $52,000 from the College of Charleston's budget, dollar for dollar matching the summer reading program's cost, for assigning this book to incoming freshmen. That is not a content objection. It's a government body using financial power to punish a university for taking queer lives seriously. The bans are the point.
Banned & challenged
Find out what they were so afraid of.
Get a copy and decide for yourself.
The stated reasons — 'sexually explicit,' 'pornographic' — describe approximately five pages of a 240-page graphic memoir about queerness, grief, and the cost of the closet. The South Carolina legislature cut $52,000 from the College of Charleston's budget (matching the summer reading program's cost, dollar for dollar) after the college assigned it as freshman summer reading. That's not a content objection — that's a government body using financial power to punish a university for taking queer lives seriously. Wentzville, Missouri banned it in 2022 despite a committee recommending retention; the ACLU sued on behalf of students. Council Rock, Pennsylvania removed it from high school libraries in 2023, again overriding the review committee's recommendation. The pattern is consistent: institutional review processes say keep it, political pressure removes it. A book about the cost of living in the wrong story is being suppressed by the same mechanisms that enforce the wrong story. Who is actually threatened by Fun Home? Everyone who benefits from queer lives staying invisible.
See every banned & challenged book on our shelves →Where This Book Lives
P&P placed this in FEEL THE FISSURE because the book is, at its core, about grief — for a father who couldn't be himself, for the years the daughter spent not knowing what she was looking at, for the near-miss of almost understanding someone in time. But it earns SEE THROUGH IT too: Bechdel is doing structural analysis throughout, mapping the machinery of the closet and mid-century masculine ideology onto a single family's history with literary precision. One note on ecosystem placement: Bechdel is writing as an adult looking back, but this is absolutely the right book for older teenagers figuring out who they are. The graphic form makes the emotional weight legible; the literary allusiveness rewards coming back to it at 30. It's marked as Independent Study — the crossover shelf — for exactly this reason.
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe(2023)
dir. Aitch Alberto
Same theme: LGBTQ+ Identity
One summer, secrets neither boy knew he had.
In 1987 El Paso, two Mexican-American teenage loners strike up a friendship that cracks open everything one of them has spent years keeping carefully closed off — including who he is. Adapted from Benjamin Alire Sáenz's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in its tenderness rather than its edge — a bilingual, bicultural, queer coming-of-age story that doesn't need trauma to justify its own gentleness. Pedagogical in showing how friendship can crack open a kid who's spent years protecting himself by staying closed.
Where to watch: Streaming on Disney+, HuluLetterboxd ↗
Fahrenheit 451(1966)
dir. François Truffaut
Same theme: Book Banning
Burning books to keep everyone happy.
In a future where books are outlawed, fireman Guy Montag burns forbidden literature for a living until a young woman's curiosity about reading unsettles his loyalty to the system. Truffaut's only English-language film, adapted from Ray Bradbury's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in imagining resistance as an act of memory — the "book people" who become the books they refuse to let die. Pedagogical in showing censorship dressed up as compassion, a government that burns literature "for everyone's peace of mind."
Where to watch: Rent/buy: Fandango at HomeLetterboxd ↗
Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Sherman Alexie
A reservation kid goes to the white school. Everyone loses.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
P is for Palestine
Golbarg Bashi
An alphabet book about Palestine. They tried to ban it.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Hair Love
Matthew Cherry
Dad has never done hair before. Zuri's hair doesn't care.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Merci Suárez Changes Gears
Meg Medina
Scholarship kid. Cuban family. Grandfather forgetting. Nobody talking.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
For the grown-up bookshelf
Same idea, written for a grown-up. Good for the adult in the room, too.
This Book Is Gay
Juno Dawson
Everything LGBTQ+ teens aren't told — told plainly
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Anger Is a Gift
Mark Oshiro
The anger you've been told to put down.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Banned Book Club
Kim Hyun Sook and Ryan Estrada (art by Ko Hyung-Ju)
A secret reading group. A dictatorship. Real arrests.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Ferdydurke
Witold Gombrowicz
Society made you small. This is how.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST