Alison Bechdel, the creator of popular comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, released her graphic memoir Fun Home after seven years of painstaking work. The result, as New York Times critic Sean Wilsey pointed out, forever changed the comics and memoir genres, galvanising both in new directions.

Fun Home is the story of Bechdel’s relationship with her parents, particularly her father, Bruce. The book explores the tremendous impact that cold, tyrannical parents have on children, deep questions of sexual orientation, family secrets and the lies people tell each other.

It chronicles Bechdel’s own realisation that she is attracted to women and her coming out to her mother. This is followed by a transformative realisation about her father’s life – and death.

The book is nonlinear in its structure; Bechdel has described it as a labyrinth, “going over the same material, but starting from the outside and spiralling into the centre of the story.”

For a tender and devastating portrait of family life and identity, and to witness the power and potential of the graphic memoir, it's hard to match Fun Home.

Published in 2006.