Originally known for the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, she came to critical and commercial success in 2006 with her graphic memoir Fun Home.

[6] Bechdel moved to Manhattan during the summer of 1981 and applied to several art schools, but was rejected and worked in many office jobs in the publishing industry.

[9] Dykes to Watch Out For began this process, developing into a series of posters and postcards, allowing for people to have a look into the urban lesbian community.

[11][12] In 2012, Bechdel was a Mellon Residential Fellow for Arts and Practice at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center at the University of Chicago and co-taught "Lines of Transmission: Comics & Autobiography" with Professor Hillary Chute.

[15] After Donald Trump's election as U.S. president she posted three new episodes of Dykes to Watch Out For: "Pièce de Résistance,"[16] "Postcards From the Edge,"[17] and "Things Fall Apart.

[20] Fun Home has received more widespread mainstream attention than Bechdel's earlier work, with reviews in Entertainment Weekly, People and several features in The New York Times.

Lev Grossman and Richard LeCayo described Fun Home as "the unlikeliest literary success of 2006," and called it "a stunning memoir about a girl growing up in a small town with her cryptic, perfectionist dad and slowly realizing that a) she is gay and b) he is too… Bechdel's breathtakingly smart commentary duets with eloquent line drawings.

[35] In 2014, the Republican-led South Carolina House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee considered cutting the College of Charleston's funding by $52,000 for selecting Fun Home.

The addition of Fun Home to the summer reading list caused significant backlash from some conservative students who found the depiction of sexuality to be "immoral," and "pornographic" for "graphically showing lesbian acts.

Sets and costumes were by David Zinn, lighting by Ben Stanton, sound by Kai Harada, projections by Jim Findlay and Jeff Sugg and choreography by Danny Mefford.

[42] The musical played at Broadway's Circle in the Square Theatre, with previews from March 27, 2015, and an official opening on April 19, 2015, running to September 10, 2016.

[43] On January 3, 2020, it was announced that Jake Gyllenhaal and his Nine Stories Productions banner secured the rights to adapt the musical version of Fun Home into a film.

Bechdel described its themes as "the self, subjectivity, desire, the nature of reality, that sort of thing,"[46] which is a paraphrase of a quote from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

The story's dramatic action is multi-layered and divides into a number of narrative strands: An excerpt of the book, entitled "Mirror", was included in the Best American Comics 2013, edited by Jeff Smith.

This episode riffs heavily on psychoanalytic themes quoted explicitly from the work of psychoanalysts Alice Miller and Donald Winnicott.

[53] For her outstanding contributions to the comic art form, in 2016 ComicsAlliance listed Bechdel as one of twelve women cartoonists deserving of lifetime achievement recognition.