Blankets
Craig Thompson
A semi-autobiographical graphic novel about a young man's childhood in a strict religious household and his first love. Its intimate, lyrical pages match Fun Home's emotional focus on family and self-discovery.
11 books to read next
Books Like Fun Home
If you loved Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Readers who love Fun Home usually come for its candid, precise memoir about a complicated father, a family shaped by secrets, and a young woman working out her identity. Its tone is wry and tender rather than sensational, and it uses literature as a lens on real life. The pace moves back and forth in time, and the drawings carry as much meaning as the words. The picks below follow those threads: graphic memoir, hard-won family honesty, queer coming-of-age, and books that share its literary allusions.
More graphic family memoirs
Stitches
David Small
A wordless-feeling, deeply personal memoir about a silent, emotionally withholding family and a childhood shaped by illness and secrecy. Readers drawn to Fun Home's frank look at a difficult parent will find much to share.
Honest, hard-edged family memoirs
The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls
A memoir of a childhood with a brilliant but volatile father and a chaotic household. Like Fun Home, it treats a flawed parent with clear-eyed affection and lets the reader draw their own conclusions.
H Is for Hawk
Helen Macdonald
A literary memoir about grief, a difficult father-daughter bond and the attempt to make sense of loss through close observation. Its precise, reflective prose appeals to readers of Fun Home's essayistic style.
Hunger
Roxane Gay
A searing memoir about the body, family history and the damage of silence. Its candid, controlled writing and refusal of easy answers echo the honesty that makes Fun Home so affecting.
Queer coming-of-age classics
Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin
A novel about a young American man's struggle with his sexuality in postwar Paris, told with lyrical intensity. Readers who connected with Fun Home's portrait of a closeted father and a daughter's coming out will find its emotional terrain familiar.
Stone Butch Blues
Leslie Feinberg
A frank, moving account of gender and identity in working-class queer life across decades. Its honesty about desire and belonging speaks to the same concerns that drive Fun Home.
Orlando
Virginia Woolf
A playful, witty novel about identity, gender and time, full of the literary sensibility Fun Home also shows. Readers who enjoyed its intelligence and sly humour will find a kindred spirit here.
Go deeper into the literary references
Ulysses
James Joyce
Fun Home draws heavily on Joyce, and this novel is the book its author returns to as a touchstone. Reading it alongside Fun Home adds a rich layer of context to the memoir's literary world.
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fun Home features Fitzgerald's novel as a key reference point. Its story of longing, illusion and class offers a compact, elegant companion for readers curious about the books that shaped Fun Home.
Maus
Art Spiegelman
A graphic memoir that tackles a parent's painful past and the author's difficult relationship with him. Its serious use of the comics form to deal with family trauma makes it a natural next step for Fun Home readers.
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