FOR THREE DECADES, Alison Bechdel has been challenging and transforming æsthetic boundaries. First as a lesbian, whose comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For was widely syndicated for 25 years, and then as an award-winning graphic novelist with Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Time magazine named it the best book of 2006 and it won a Lambda Literary Award.
This innovative graphic memoir literally and figuratively drew us into Bechdel’s dysfunctional family, particularly her relationship with her father, a stern, obsessive man who was a high school English teacher and ran a funeral home. It wasn’t until she was in college, when she came out as a lesbian, that she discovered her father had been a closeted gay man. They had only one conversation about their shared gay identity. A few weeks later he committed suicide.
Bechdel’s memoir became an international literary sensation—a bestseller that some people wanted to ban from public libraries. This work was game changing for the genre, as Bechdel disrupted the straight male pantheon of comic literature with her unabashedly queer sensibility. Her book was virtuosic and ingenious in its visual construction and literary execution, demonstrating that graphic novels were not solely the domains of youth. Now Bechdel returns with a new graphic work, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, which fills in the back story of her tumultuous childhood on up to the writing of her earlier memoir.
John R. Killacky: Congratulations on the new book—great reviews and features in The New Yorker, Time, and on NPR, and already a second printing. Why did the new memoir take six years to write?
Alison Bechdel: Well, if I were only writing that, it would have gone a little more quickly. But of course I’m drawing it, too, and designing it, mapping the story out over the pages in a way that makes sense. People who just write have it easy! They don’t have to physically produce each page of their books. They turn over a manuscript, and the book designer sets it up so that the text flows from left to right across the page, and on to the next page, and so forth. But in a graphic book, it matters where things fall on the page. Each word and picture has to fit into a precise spot.
JRK: In the new book you revisit some of the material from Fun Home, but now the focus is on your mother rather than your father. What did you learn in this process?
AB: In a way, the memoir about my mother is about writing the memoir about my father. Writing Fun Home entailed revealing family secrets—that my dad was gay, and that he killed himself. And that was a hard thing to do to my mother, who is very private. Telling her I was going to write about my father, and then showing her early drafts of the book and dealing with her reaction entailed a deep psychic struggle that in the end was very freeing for me, emotionally and creatively. So I wanted to try and figure out how that happened, what enabled me to do that. And for me it was very bound up with work I was doing in therapy. I guess the main thing I learned in the process of writing about my mother was exactly how psychotherapy and analysis work to fix things that didn’t go well in early childhood. I had experienced the benefits of therapy, but in this book I was trying to figure out how it worked.
JRK: Literary references abound in the new book. Why the conceit of juxtaposing Virginia Woolf’s diary entries and writings from psychologists Donald Winnicott, Alice Miller, and Freud with your own material?
AB: Well, one of my problems is that I’m more comfortable with ideas than with emotions. When I started doing therapy in my late twenties, I read Alice Miller’s book The Drama of the Gifted Child, and while I related to it pretty strongly, I also had a hard time grasping it. It was written for psychoanalysts and I didn’t understand a lot of the terminology. When I began working on this book about my mother, I went back to one of Miller’s sources, the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. I felt a deep connection to his ideas about the relationship between the mother and the baby, and how as a pair they work to enable the baby to separate from the mother. His theories, too, were often difficult to grasp. But they were also deeply compelling. I wanted to figure out how to convey his ideas to a general audience without watering them down.
Virginia Woolf figures into my book because she talked about how the experience of writing about her parents in To The Lighthouse was a way of getting them out of her head. She wrote, “I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion.” Writing about my father had done that for me, and I was hoping that writing about my mother would do it again.
JRK: Your drawing style is precise, uncluttered, and direct. As a graphic novelist, how do you actually construct the frame-by-frame narrative as told in drawings and text?
AB: I “write” in a drawing program on my computer. I don’t do a lot of the actual, pencil-and-ink hand drawing until after I’ve laid the story out onscreen, but I’m conceiving of it in panels and page spreads as I write, envisioning the images that go with my narration and dialogue. I can’t really explain how I do it. Some of it is instinctual, some of it is trial and error. I guess the general principle is that the words and the pictures need to have some kind of tension between them, a certain space that the reader fills in like an electrical current jumping across the gap in a spark plug.
JRK: Throughout the book, you challenged yourself to stop “writing around something.” What did you mean by this?
AB: For a long time, Are You My Mother? was not explicitly about my mother. She was in the mix, definitely, but there was a lot of abstract stuff about the self and the other, and scenes from my own romantic misadventures. It took me a while to prune away a lot of that stuff and see that the story of me and my mother was really the main thing.
It was daunting to write directly about my mother because writing itself is a very charged topic between us. She is a writer. She wrote poetry when she was young. Then, after raising three kids and retiring from her career as a high school English teacher, she got back to poetry and also began writing a column and articles for her local paper. I think she would have liked to have been a fiction writer, though she’s never said that to me. She’s a voracious reader, and she’s fascinated with writers and their lives. So Mom was the writer in our family, and I ceded that ground to her, even though I was interested in writing, too.
My mom was also very critical, in both constructive and destructive ways, about writing. I think she was so critical that it inhibited her from writing more herself, or from writing more freely. It certainly inhibited me from writing. I couldn’t face the prospect of competing with her. So it took me a while to come around to that, to build up the determination to take my mother on.
JRK: Within your fraught maternal narrative, there’s much hilarity in your odyssey, some of it at your own expense, and your anxiety and self-doubts are on display. How were you able to strike a balance and not merely focus on shame and blame?
AB: I guess achieving that balance is the essence of the writing process. I was miserable for a lot of the time I was writing this book. I wrote a lot of bad stuff, but there was no way to avoid that. I had to write the wrong things to get to the right ones. I think therapy helped a lot too, to give me a broader perspective, to not just wallow in blame or self-reproach, but to see where those impulses come from.
JRK: What’s next for you now that the book is out?
AB: Honestly, I’m feeling kind of burned out. I spent this spring touring and promoting Are You My Mother? and also teaching a comics class at the University of Chicago. That was all really great, but intense and exhausting. I’m starting to work on another family memoir, but it’s going to be a long, slow project. I’d like to do something else at the same time, something lighter, perhaps a shorter format. There’s also a musical version of Fun Home in production at the Public Theatre in New York. The playwright Lisa Kron and the composer Jeanine Tesori have been working on that for several years now, and Sam Gold has come on board to direct. I’m not directly involved in it, but I might be helping with drawings that will somehow be part of the production. There will be a workshop this fall, and the play will probably open some time in late 2013.
I saw a workshop last fall, and it’s pretty amazing.
John R. Killacky is CEO of the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts in Burlington, VT.
