Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006)

Shortlisted: National Book Critics Circle Award, autobiography, 2006. Alison Bechdel's memoir of growing up in a family funeral business, and of the closeted father whose death she spends the book trying to read, earned its place among prose memoirs on the critics' shortlist and topped Time's books of the year. It is the most literary book here in the plainest sense: it argues with Proust, Joyce and Fitzgerald as it goes, and each chapter circles back over the same events with new knowledge. If you only read memoir in prose, start with this one.