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