Alison Bechdel, Author of

Wednesday, March 14, 6:00-8:00pm Presented by the Broward County Library and Stonewall Library & Archives Broward County Main Library 100 S. Andrews Ave Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301 (954) 357-7444 Free Admission Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert, an obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian house, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, she finds out, is involved with male students and a family babysitter. Through a narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers called it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books, which Alison read at her father's insistence. A sort of intimacy, if only a literary one, sprang up between them. Alison Bechdel has won numerous Lambda Literary Awards, was a Ferro-Grumley Award finalist, and has been nominated for the Will Eisner Comic Industry Award. Fun Home is a breakout book for this already established comic artist. It's a coming-of-age classic, marked by gothic twists, sexual angst, and great books, which portrays the parent-child relationship — and the complex longing therein — in moving and universal terms. Fun Home is the first memoir by Alison Bechdel, who since 1983 has been chronicling the lives of various characters in her fictional Dykes to Watch Out For strip, "one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comic genre, period" (Ms.). The strip is syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers, translated into several languages, and collected in a book series with a quarter of a million copies in print. Utne magazine has listed DTWOF as "one of the greatest hits of the twentieth century."