Podcast: Alison Bechdel

I feel bad doing this, because I really owe the blog a "real" post. But instead I'm going to direct your attention to the Writers At Cornell Blog, where I have just posted a brief interview with cartoonist and graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel. We talked about the fluidity of memory, the pitfalls of writing about real people, the advantages of drawing small, and how obsessive-compulsive tendencies can be brought to bear upon the making of good art.

I want to reiterate here how much I love Bechdel's book, Fun Home, and how much I admire her for writing it. If you're a fan of her long-running indie comic Dykes To Watch Out For, you're accustomed to her political acumen, distinctive drawing style, and memorable characters. But nothing in the strip really prepared me for Fun Home, which I find amazingly moving and genuine and deep. Her evocation of childhood--specifically, the childhood of an artist--is extraordinary. The book is obviously deeply personal, but it also creates a kind of universal portrait of the birth of the creative imagination, and is a must for anyone obsessed with making things.

Alison gave a fantastic reading and presentation at Cornell last night, one that included not only an emotional delivery of the book's first chapter, but a hilarious and instructive explanation of how it came to be. It speaks volumes about what kind of person Alison is that, after presenting this material many times to many audiences over the past couple of years, she was still visibly moved by it, and managed to move all of us, as well.

Fun Home Revisited

I just wanted the opportunity to weigh in on Fun Home, which I bought last week and Rhian swiped (and posted about!) before I got a chance to read. I read it, and I have to agree with Rhian, it's fantastic.

I always thought DTWOF was a pretty good strip--Bechdel's drawing style has always appealed to me, and her characters are strong. But the strip was always a little too relentlessly contemporary for my taste, tending to focus more on the intersection of character and politics than that of character and memory. The latter being the milieu I hold most dear.

Wow, the book certainly gave me what I wanted. It's brilliant--the perfect blend of reminiscence, analysis, erudition and inspiration. Plus there's lots of stuff about Proust and Joyce in it, not to mention some hot and heavy lovin'.

There is one drawing of Bechdel's family sprawled out in their museumesque living room, sloppily going about their lives--playing with cars and Tinkertoys, watching TV, and so on. Her detached, aesthete father is scrunched up between the fainting couch and the bookcase with a big bucket of fried chicken in his lap, and I find this image amazingly moving--the kind of perfect character detail that literary fiction is supposed to be providing for our culture, but hasn't bothered to for some time. At the same time I was reading the new Acme Novelty Library and the latest from Paul Hornschemeier, and while they're both good (particularly the Ware, whose Jimmy Corrigan is one of the greatest examples of the form ever), Bechdel has them both beat. Fun Home is pretty much perfect, right down to the last panel.

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

My friend Norah told me to read this months ago, but it was still in hardcover so I didn't. Now that it's in paperback I thought I'd give it a try. It's terrifyingly good -- terrifying because it's a graphic novel, and, er, I can't draw. During the last couple years I've had the unnerving sense that far more exciting things are happening in the world of graphic novels than in regular fiction. Cartoonists have found ways to express truth, beauty, and surprise that make traditional, non-visual narratives seem flat. Worst of all: any fool can type up a page of prose, but only handful of us can draw. I ain't one of them, and that hurts.

I called "Fun Home" a "graphic novel," but actually it's a graphic memoir. Bechdel, of "Dykes To Watch Out For," (I have to admit that the title of that comic always bugged me -- why "watch out for"? Are they going to become famous, or just, like a mean dog, bite me on the thigh?) writes and draws about her childhood in small town Pennsylvania and her coming of age as a lesbian, and the simultaneous realization that her father -- who died in a suspicious, possibly suicidal, accident -- was probably gay too. Bechdel's art is less "arty" and self-conscious than that of Daniel Clowes, and more like Marjane Satrapi's -- frank and straight-forward and wordy. I particularly enjoyed the glimpses of Bechdel's college life. Hey -- isn't that my alma mater?

She has a fun blog, too.