Bechdel has written a graphic memoir, Fun Home, about growing up and the relationship she had with her father, a closeted gay man. Bechdel discovered her father’s sexual orientation just as she was coming out herself and right before his death.
The dark and serious tale is quite a departure from her comic strip. We peek into Bechdel’s early life with a controlling father and distant mother. It is at times brutally honest and intellectually challenging. Literature was a key way Bechdel and her father related and the memoir is littered with references to classics that might be intimidating to the average DTWOF fan. Camus, Fitzgerald and Proust are cited for the similarities to her father’s life.
Alison Bechdel's Memoir: Fun Home
As for Bechdel, writing the memoir was both a blessing and a curse. She always felt it was a story that needed to be told, but the process took her seven years. First she started with writing the text. The comic strip writer had to learn a whole new way to tell a story. “My comic strip is mostly dialogue and mostly silly. A lot of (Fun Home) is not dialogue, but narration.”
In addition to learning to write a new way, creating the book was a tedious process. For every panel in the book, Bechdel posed and took a digital picture to reference in her drawing. “My intention was not to act out every scene, but I did pretty much do that. It was a side effect of my crazy compulsive drawing technique.” Another side effect was that Bechdel put herself in the position of acting out her parent’s relationship. “An unintended consequence of this technique is that it immerses me in the world of my story. I’m embodying my parents having an argument,” she says. “It gives me emotional access to the story.”
Bechdel says she uses the same technique to create her bi-weekly comic strip. She calls it her “barely harnessed obsessive compulsive disorder.”
“Part of what motivates me to draw is this urge to capture a little bit of real life in tiny black and white drawing. It calms me down,” she says. But she has to keep it in check. “If I were to start drawing something that I’m looking at right now, it could take me the rest of my life. There’s that much detail. For me the big challenge is knowing when to stop. If I’m drawing a bookshelf in the background do I draw all the books? Do I include the title from the spine? Do I include logos of the publishers on the spine?”
She is proud of her efforts. “I made a book,” she says. “A novelist just writes down some words and sends it off. I actually made this book with my hands. I know intimately what fell on each square inch of each page.”
The story is cyclical. Spiraling back over the events of Bechdel’s life. “I felt telling a simple chronological story wasn’t going to work because it was too complicated,” she says. “I ended up moving in a spiral. Instead of following a linear trajectory, the story goes like a labyrinth, spiraling into a central core and then back out again over the same turf.”
Gay Dad/Lesbian Daughter
One of the themes Bechdel explores in her memoir is the parallel lives she and her father were living. She was coming out just as she discovered her father was gay and probably having affairs with underage boys. “In some way, I feel like I’ve been trying to avenge his death,” she says.
Gay Culture Was her Saving Grace
One way she did that was to immerse herself into the gay and lesbian community of the early 1980s. “The whole queer subculture that I discovered at that age right after he died was a huge antidote to my pain,” she says. “It was this great exciting party that I could join.” [p Since 1983 she has been churning out two Dykes to Watch Out For comic strips each month. Her characters have changed and evolved as the lesbian community has. Dealing with the closure of women’s bookstores, breast cancer, trans issues and current political events. “I’m not a news junkie,” Bechdel says. “But I do force myself to read the news. I have a regimen of media intake that I force myself to follow.”
She also has a excel spreadsheet to keep track of all the characters and their story lines. She doesn’t have the story lines mapped out in advance, but she does have ideas of where she would like them to go. “I can’t write too far ahead because I try to tie the story into current events,” she says.
Which character does Bechdel see herself most in? “I used to be more like Mo, but now I’m more Sydney,” she says. Sydney is the materialistic dyke who runs up her credit cards on all the latest technology toys. “I always give Sydney things in the strip a couple of years before I’m able to afford them,” Bechdel says. “Like a cell phone, a flat screen TV. But I’ve also gotten very jaded like Sydney.”
Buy Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.
