Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The journey we take to get where we are going

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

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My journey to Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel was, to say was odd, but normal for me. I knew of Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out for series. I have the collection on my TBR list. And I knew that they had this book when it came out. The store I work at hosted an event. (July 2018 to be exact) I was interested in but forgot (long story why) to attend. Flash forward to about two months ago when I was speaking […]

What Happens When Family Secrets Go Unspoken

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Bechdel, Alison

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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel My rating: 4 of 5 stars Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” is both biography and autobiography. On the one hand we focus a lot on her father and how his life largely shapes and sometimes mirrors her own. Yet, it’s also how his life impacts her and how she’s the woman she is when the book closes during her college years. Regardless of how you’d categorize this book it doesn’t diminish the power of how our parents influence […]

Libidinal. Manic. Martyred.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

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I honestly didn’t know what the book was about as I opened it, but its reputation precedes it, and I’ve read Are You My Mother?  so really I should have guessed. The book details Alison Bechdel’s relationship with her father, an unsatisfied 12th grade English teacher who loved gardening, Albert Camus, borderline (or not so borderline) trysts with young men, and books. The narrator does not know about the young men until much later. What comes next though is the eccentricities of her father, the spelling […]

“I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity.”

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

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I’d heard of Alison Bechdel from the Bechdel test, but I wasn’t at all familiar with her or her work. I picked up Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) because it was on my 50 Books Every Woman Should Read Before She Turns 40 List. I think I’ve only read one other graphic novel (maybe), but I appreciate being forced out of my comfort zone every now and then. Although it hasn’t changed my preference for traditional writing and the pictures in my head, Fun Home was worth reading. Fun Home is […]

It’s our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!

Are you my Mother? by Alison Bechdel

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Here’s some questions: Are you?? Does this book pass the Bechdel test? Yes, overwhelmingly. Also, say the title of the book with the emphasis that makes the most sense to you. ARE you my mother? Are YOU my mother? Are you MY mother? Are you my MOTHER? All of these work for this book. This is a follow-up memoir after Fun Home, that is a mature and interesting work, but one that’s also less successful and ultimately less memorable. This book follows more so along […]

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

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While I already knew of Alison Bechdel and had some idea of the what her first graphic novel is about, I genuinely wasn’t prepared for how much Fun Home would affect me emotionally. It was a roller coaster of feelings, beautifully told and illustrated. Bechdel is only slightly older than I am, so her memoir of growing up in the 70s and 80s had some very familiar echoes. Though our families were dysfunctional in completely different ways, the family dynamics, cultural and social norms which she describes in Fun Home very […]



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