There’s a story about Fun Home in today’s New York Times Home and Garden section. I drove to my home town a couple weeks ago to meet Ginia Bellafante, the reporter, at the house I spent my childhood dusting. The place is on the market, and a lot of my dad’s decorating is still intact.
Fun Home is being published serially, two pages a day for the rest of the summer, in the French newspaper Liberation. Unfortunately, you can only see it in the actual paper, not the online edition. “Fun Home; Une Tragecomedie Familiale” will be published in book form in October. Aren’t you impressed that I spoke such fluent French as a child?
I think I’m too old. But they have Fun Home listed as one of their featured books.
I know Fun Home has gotten a lot of good reviews, but this article by Hillary Chute in the Village Voice is excellent. She really gets the book. A most gratifying sensation indeed.
Fun Home is on the NY Times Book Review bestseller list. They only list the top 15 in the magazine. But the “extended list” goes down to number 35. And Fun Home is number 30. The latest version isn’t up yet, but on last week’s it’s number 35. Ann Coulter, alas, tops the chart. But I’m stunned to be on there at all.
But it’s gone back to press. I guess this is kind of a good thing, because it means people have been snapping the book up. But it’s also kind of a bad thing, because now other people won’t be able to get it for a while. You can probably still find it in lots of stores, but if not, more are coming July 9th.
I recently did a short interview about Fun Home with Liane Hansen for Weekend Edition, and it’s going to air on tomorrow morning’s show. It was originally supposed to run two Sundays ago, on Father’s Day, but it got bumped. I liked the Father’s Day connection, since the book is all about my dad. But tomorrow’s even better, because it happens to be the anniversary of his death. 26 years.
Here’s th’link.
When I was in Portland earlier this month, Powell’s Books set up a conversation between me and Craig Thompson. Craig’s beautiful graphic novel Blankets crossed over and got a lot of mainstream readers when it came out in 2003. He lives in Portland, and both our books are about growing up in small towns with, um, kind of dysfunctional families. So Powell’s thought we’d have an interesting conversation together, and indeed we did. Although perhaps we both overdid the self-deprecation a tad.
