Recommendations
Books Like Fun Home
Best books to read after Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
If Fun Home moved you — Bruce Bechdel's impossible double life, Alison's coming out and the literary references that unlock her father's secret, the way the memoir holds grief and discovery and irony simultaneously — these eight books share its portrait of children reckoning with their parents' hidden lives, its graphic memoir form, or its engagement with the relationship between literature and identity.
- 1Buy
Persepolis
by Marjane Satrapi
Marjane Satrapi growing up in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution — Satrapi's graphic memoir is the most direct companion to Fun Home in the graphic memoir form: both use the combination of text and image to examine a coming-of-age in a family and political context that the conventional memoir form could not hold, and both are organized around a girl's relationship with her parents' world and her own need to understand and escape it; where Bechdel's secret is her father's sexuality, Satrapi's is the political history that her family survived
- 2Buy
Maus
by Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman interviewing his father Vladek about Auschwitz, in graphic novel form — Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize winner is the founding work of the serious graphic memoir, and Fun Home is in explicit dialogue with it: both are the stories of children who interview or observe difficult fathers in order to understand their own histories; where Spiegelman's father survived the Holocaust, Bechdel's father died with his secret; both works use the graphic form to show the gap between what parents tell children and what actually happened
- 3Buy
Are You My Mother?
by Alison Bechdel
The companion volume to Fun Home, organized around Bechdel's relationship with her mother and her years in psychotherapy — Bechdel's follow-up examines the mother she didn't write about in Fun Home; more formally experimental, organized around the psychoanalytic framework that Bechdel uses in therapy; recommended immediately after Fun Home for readers who want the complete Bechdel project
- 4Buy
The Glass Castle
by Jeannette Walls
Jeannette Walls's memoir about growing up with nomadic, impractical parents — the nonfiction companion to Fun Home: the same portrait of a child who loves difficult parents and must eventually understand how much they failed her; where Bechdel's difficulty is coming to understand her father's secret homosexuality, Walls's difficulty is coming to understand her parents' irresponsibility as a form of damage rather than adventure
- 5Buy
Giovanni's Room
by James Baldwin
David, an American in Paris, unable to acknowledge his love for an Italian man — Baldwin's novel is one of the canonical literary works on gay male identity that Bruce Bechdel might have read, and Fun Home is in direct engagement with the closeted gay male literary tradition that Bechdel discovers in her father's bookshelves; recommended for readers who want to understand the literary world that her father was navigating
- 6Buy
The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens the butler looking back on a life of service and discovering he gave up everything for a man who didn't deserve it — Ishiguro's Booker Prize winner shares Fun Home's portrait of a person who has organized their life around a particular form of excellence (Bruce's aesthetic perfectionism, Stevens's professional dignity) at the cost of what their actual inner life required; both novels are organized around the retrospective realization of what was sacrificed
- 7Buy
Educated
by Tara Westover
Tara Westover's memoir about educating herself out of a survivalist Idaho family — the nonfiction companion to Fun Home in its portrait of a daughter who must rethink everything she was taught to understand by the family that formed her; where Bechdel's revelation is her father's homosexuality and its relationship to his death, Westover's revelation is that her parents' survivalism was a form of abuse she didn't recognize as such while she was inside it
- 8Buy
The Argonauts
by Maggie Nelson
Maggie Nelson's hybrid memoir about her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge and her pregnancy — Nelson's auto-theory is the contemporary companion to Fun Home in its engagement with queer identity and family; where Bechdel investigates the closet and its costs, Nelson investigates what queer family formation looks like when the closet is no longer necessary; both works use literary and theoretical references as structural elements
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