Aliscnt Bechdel has- been a careful archivist erf her own life and kept a jour nal since she was ten. Bechdel grew up in rural Pennsylvania. After graduating, from Oberlin College, she moved to New York City, where she began draw ing Dykes to Watch Out For in 1983. In her new book, Fun Home: A Family^ Tragicomic (Houghton Mifflin, June) Alison Bechdel is finally telling her own story. A year after her father died, when she was twenty years old, Alison Bechdel was looking through some old family pho tographs and found one of a Song man m underwear. She recog nized him as a student of .her father's and a family babysit ter. She. also came across a photo of her father as a young man, wearing a women’s bathing suit There were also snapshots of her mother over die years, in which her expression' transformed vividly from hopefulness to. resignation to bit terness. Alison found her owA child hood pictures, of a girl who looked like a boy. :v She knew that these snapshots con veyed much more information than she suspected, and there was a deeper story begging to be told, about a daughter who inadvertently "outs” her gay father; who meets a tragic end. But the painful circumstances that make her story, so compelling also rendered her incapable of telling it for a long time. ^ Alison was inhibited not just by the shock of her father's death, but by the impact of his life—his domination and deception and the alternately encour aging and crushing influence that he had on her creativity. In her early twen ties she attempted, in prose, to tell her personal part of the tale, but it eluded her. Instead, she turned her creative efforts to an entirely different project: drawing Dykes to Watch Out Far. Years have passed, and she is finally ready to ... ■; tell her own story. " In Fun Home, you will meet Alison's father a historic preservation expert, an obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian house, a third-generation funeral home directory a high school • brvgusn teacner, an I idly distant par A ent, and a doset ■ ed homosexual ■ who, she finds B out; is involved ■ with male stu dents and a • family babysit ter. Through a - l narrative that I is alternately I heartbreak ■ ing * and H fiercely X funny, we l-'aR'yi into a complex yearning for her father. Fun Home is a breakout book for this already established comic artist If$ a coming-of-age classic, marked by goth: ic twists, sexual angst and great books, that portrays the parent-child relation ship — and tiie complex longing there in— in moving and universal terms. Q: What motivated you to tell the story of your relationship with your father at this particular time? A: I've been wanting tq tell this story since I was twenty, a year after my father died. As soon as I had the slight* est bit of perspective on what had hap pened, I could see that it was just a real ly good story. And (realized eventually mat what the book was really about was not his suicide, or our shared homosexuality, or the books we read. It was about my creative apprenticeship to my father: It was about becoming an artist But I didn't have die skills to tell it when I was twenty — emotional, creative, or .'technical. Also, I couldn’t imagine revealing the big family secret, that my father was gay. That was a major obsta cle. Nor was I thinking of it back then as BUT£HTOWSMEU-y. modern to his Victorian. OTUTARMN TO HIS «STWETE. whocarsSf THE NECKUNES DONT Match? A: I did a lot of reading. A big part of the book is taken up with my father’s rela tionship with vari ous books and authors. So I had to read or reread all the books and plays that I cite in the text — though I confess to only selectively skimming In Search of Lost Time. I also read a lot of biographies — Proust, Wilde, both Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Camus. ||m| Then ther^PP^B®Bi my own archives — my childhood diaries and drawings, my father's letters. Old datebooks and calen dars. And of course our family photo graph albums. Those photos were really my primary source for the book. Poring over them, recreating them painstakingly a graphic story — mat was still pre Maus, and 'coihics hadn’t become a medium for serious storytelling yet I finally sat down to write the book when I was almost forty, right at that ..weird midpoint in my life where my father had been dead for the same num ber of years he'd been alive. I knew that this project would have to be more ambitious and revealing, more literary, than what Id been doing in my comic , strip. That meant confronting my father's artist fixation head-on. I had to dismantle his inhibiting critical power over me before I could tell the story. But tellingthe story was the only way to do the dismantling. It was like trying, to; vacuum under a rug while you're still standing on it Q: In researdtit^ Ftm Home, you read the bodes that your father loved. What other research did you do? in pal ana ink, trying to discern their hidden messages. I took thousands of new reference photos — of me posing as virtually all the characters in the book. I got very dependent on my digital camera throughout this process. I'm kind of a method cartoonist. In one of my more vivid research efforts, I stood beside the road at the spot where my dad died, photographing trucks as . they approached and passed. It seemed important not just to know what that locked like, but what it felt like. Q: Most memoirs are written in prose. Why is Fun Home a graphic story? A: I did have a very visually stimu lating upbringing, what with all the wallpaper patterns and scrollwork and gaudy Victorian bric-a-brac — not to contliHNd on page 14 South Carolina Pride 'W