Book Club Guide

Fun Home

by Alison Bechdel · 2006 · Graphic Novels

Key themes

The father's secret life and the daughter's discovery of her own
Memory, drawing and the act of returning to the past
Tragedy as something you only understand when you can name it

About this book

A literary graphic memoir about a father, a funeral home and coming out; intricate and deeply felt.

Published in 2006, Fun Home is widely credited with bringing literary graphic memoir to mainstream attention. It was adapted into a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical in 2015. Bechdel reportedly worked on it for seven years.

Discussion questions

Bechdel reconstructs her father's life partly from literary texts — Ulysses, Proust, Fitzgerald — that he loved and that she reads as clues. How does this literary detective work function as both method and metaphor?
The title Fun Home refers to the family's ironic nickname for the funeral home they ran. How does this macabre setting function in the memoir — as dark comedy, as symbol, or both?
Bechdel discovers her own lesbian identity partly through her father's example. How does she handle the complex legacy of a father whose secret life was both like and unlike her own?
The memoir is told non-chronologically, moving between different periods of Bechdel's memory. Why does she tell it this way — and what would a linear account lose?
Fun Home is one of the most widely taught graphic memoirs. What does it offer students of literature, comics or LGBTQ+ history — and what conversations does it make possible?