Fun Home review – Alison Bechdel’s musical memoir feels every emotion
A celebration of the cartoonist’s sexual awakening and queer identity as well as an investigation of darker family dynamics, this soulful show wears its heart on its sleeve
May 2025
Book of the day
Spent by Alison Bechdel review – the graphic novelist faces up to midlife
In this playfully fictionalised memoir, Alison runs a pygmy goat sanctuary while making a name for herself on stage and screen
December 2024
Rachel Cooke’s best graphic novels of 2024
From Aimée de Jongh’s contemporary reworking of a William Golding classic to an extraterrestrial tale from Charles Burns, here are the best titles of the year
July 2023
Alison Bechdel: ‘The Bechdel test was a joke... I didn’t intend for it to become a real gauge’
The US graphic novelist on having her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, turned into an audio series, growing up in a funeral home, and her famous women-in-film test
June 2023
Top 10s
Top 10 Sapphic love stories
The days when lesbian stories were always racked with anguish are behind us. As Pride month gets under way, here is some rather more joyful reading
May 2022
Dave Eggers offers to replace books a South Dakota school board wants to pulp
The writer calls the planned destruction of copies of five titles – by Bernardine Evaristo, Alison Bechdel, Imbolo Mbue and Stephen Chbosky as well as his own – ‘an unconscionable horror’
November 2021
US libraries report spike in organised attempts to ban books in schools
No straight lines: Alison Bechdel and the unstoppable rise of queer comics
May 2021
Fun Home review – Alison Bechdel memoir-musical adaptation burrows its way into your heart
Yoga, karate, skiing … Alison Bechdel on her lifelong obsession with exercise
September 2019
The secret herstory: what happened to Donna Tartt's women?
Best culture of the 21st century
The 100 best books of the 21st century
February 2019
Top 10s
From Tales of the City to Tipping the Velvet: top 10 books about coming out
Novelist Kate Davies picks the best books about a task that never happens just once
December 2018
Top 10s
Top 10 fictional booksellers
From Italo Calvino to Iain Sinclair and Alison Bechdel, literary retailers have been at the centre of some wild, dark dramas
October 2018
Top 10s
Robin Ince's top 10 books about the human condition
From Douglas Adams to Oliver Sacks, the standup comedian reveals some of the writers that have helped him try to work out what makes us tick
July 2018
The week in theatre: Fun Home; One for Sorrow; Undaunted; Windrush: 492 – review
Acclaimed cartoonist Alison Bechdel comes to life in a remarkable new musical, a stranger menaces liberal London, and a high-wire suffragette thrills
June 2018
Fun Home review – Bechdel memoir takes stage musical in new directions
This adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel is a beautifully performed mix of memory-play and strip-cartoon
June 2017
Wonder women: how this summer's TV passes the Bechdel test
Shows such as Orange is the New Black, GLOW and Claws allow their female characters to do more than just play the girlfriend, signaling important progress
September 2016
Banned Books Week 2016: the 10 most challenged titles – in pictures
As the American Libraries Association’s annual celebration of the right to read kicks off, take a look through the titles most frequently ‘challenged’ in 2015, and some of the reasons behind the calls to ban them
August 2016
The women's blog
Why the Bechdel test doesn’t (always) work
Samantha Ellis
If this simple gauge of gender inequality in film has Twilight winning over Gravity, there’s obviously something wrong. As a feminist playwright, I’ve found another solution
