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The Book Review
'Fun Home' Author Alison Bechdel on Her New Graphic Novel
00:35:51
Alison Bechdel rose to fame as the creator of a long-running alt-weekly comic strip before jumping to an even wider audience by way of her celebrated graphic memoirs “Fun Home” and “Are You My Mother?” Her new book, “Spent,” is a graphic novel — but it was originally meant to be another memoir, as Bechdel tells Gilbert Cruz on this week’s podcast.
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- [00:00]
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- [00:39]
Gilbert Cruz
I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast. On this week's show, I'm joined by one of the most lauded memorists of our time. She also just happens to be one of the most notable cartoonists of our time. Put those two things together and you get a book like Fun Home, one of the New York Times 100 best books of the 21st century. Or a book like its follow up, Are youe My Mother? Both were written by Alison Bechtel, who started her career in the early 1980s with the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. Allison has a new book, a comic novel, which features several characters from that long running comic. Allison, welcome to the Book Review podcast.
- [01:24]
Alison Bechdel
Thank you, Gilbert. Very happy to be here.
- [01:27]
Gilbert Cruz
So I need to start with an odd first question. I got an email telling me that when we mentioned your book in our spring preview episode that I had pronounced your last name wrong and that by extension everyone else forever maybe has been pronouncing your last name wrong. Is this true?
- [01:42]
Alison Bechdel
It might be true, because I've just, I stopped correcting people a long time ago and I really don't notice when people say Bechdel as opposed to Bechtel. And honestly, I don't care.
- [01:52]
Gilbert Cruz
Okay, okay. Allison Bechdel, I'm glad that I'm now going to get it right. There are readers who are going to get it right. There are listeners who are going to get it right. Allison Bechdel, you've written two graphic memoirs, Fun Home and Are youe My Mother? The first, of course, looked at your father. The second looked at your mother, and by looking at them, we're seeing you, and we're seeing how you grew up and how you came to be. This one, of course, is a little different. The main character is named Allyson, like you, and her girlfriend is named Holly, as is yours, and they live in Vermont as you do. And Alice has achieved commercial success off a memoir about her father, as you have but spent your new book is not about your real life, is it? Tell me about it.
- [02:34]
Alison Bechdel
No, it is not. It was originally going to be. I thought this was going to be a conventional memoir in the tradition of those ones about my parents, but when I sat down to write, was specifically going to be a memoir about money and like just the role of money in our lives now that money has taken over the planet. But when I thought about actually researching that and doing the work, which would probably entail reading Marx, I couldn't face it. And somehow in this moment, realizing that the book idea I had just sold was in fact not going to work, I got a whole new idea which was make something up, make it fiction. Write about someone who's trying to write this memoir about money. And somehow that was a much more captivating concept to me. So it turned into this semi auto.
- [03:26]
Gilbert Cruz
Fictional, whatever melange I feel like as a result. Because readers and certainly interviewers are used to you writing memoir, you're gonna get a lot of questions about what is real, what is not. And I'm not going to ask those questions. But I am curious because when you did our by the book feature many moons ago, you said in reference to Jeanette Winterson's memoir why Be Happy when youn Could Be Normal? That you were fascinated by the dividing line between fiction and memoir. And I'm curious how this new work has allowed you to explore that dividing line or play around with it.
- [04:03]
Alison Bechdel
Over the years that I turned myself from being a comic strip writer into a memoirist, I got very sort of self righteous about memoir as a genre. I just thought, why would you bother making anything up? Life is incredible. It's all right there. It's served up on a platter every day. Write about that. My friends who are fiction writers would say, you're able to tell a deeper kind of truth with fiction, don't you think? And I would agree with them. But secretly I would think, no, you can't. You've got to tell the actual truth. But that does get really tiresome. It gets tiring anyway, after a while, and I did, yeah, I started to see the merits of fiction. There's stuff you can do that you can't when you're trying to stick to absolute fact. So this was just a very fun, liberatory exercise. Honestly, I feel a little confused myself about what's true and what's not true in the book. And I'm starting to get it all mixed up.
- [05:03]
Gilbert Cruz
Oh boy, that's troubling. There's a part in the book spent when you Write of Allison, the character in the book. Alicent can't help feeling that she has somehow gotten seriously off course. Where had her youthful idealism gone? Precisely when had her moral erosion begun? This question is raised because Allyson, as is the case with you, has become successful off a memoir about her father. In the book, that memoir is turned into a crazy TV show as opposed to a musical. But the parallels are very similar. And the Alison of the book is wondering, I've made all this money. Am I still the idealist that I was when I was young? Is this just like the Big Chill dilemma? Is this just the thing that happens to people who want to live ethically, have a youthful idealism, have, and then have to grapple with the fact that we live in America, that we live in a capitalist society? And those two things are often at odds.
- [06:04]
Alison Bechdel
Yeah, I think it is the Big Chill 2025 version. But as opposed to the Big Chill, there's something else going on in this book too, which is this community of activists who Alison lives in. And she starts to see that there are other possibilities for how to live, and she starts to slowly get there herself. But it takes a bit of a process.
- [06:36]
Gilbert Cruz
What without. It's weird to use the word spoiler in reference to this book, but I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how the Allison of the book starts to sort of go along in that journey and starts to understand more explicitly the value of this community that she has around her in Vermont, where she lives, hilariously, on a pygmy goat farm.
- [06:58]
Alison Bechdel
Yes, she starts to acknowledge. I think the first step is acknowledging how isolated she's gotten in her financial comfort, in her concierge ification of her life, with getting these piles of Amazon packages dumped on her porch every day. The way she spends so much time on screens and online, the things that we're all starting to realize increasingly have cut us off from all the good things about life. She's putting that together, but increasingly she's spending time with her friends and there's just something about that real world analog connection that starts to get through to her.
- [07:40]
Gilbert Cruz
And of course, part of the reason for the isolation and all the Amazon packages, not the only reason, but part of the reason is because at the beginning of spent, Allison and Holly are coming out of the pandemic. We see them.
- [07:54]
Alison Bechdel
Yeah, yeah, this is still in the.
- [07:55]
Gilbert Cruz
Thick of COVID Yeah, we see them going over to their friend's house and we'll talk a bunch about their friends. Familiar names to your readers. But they go over to their friend's house at the beginning to watch an episode of the show that is based on Allison's memoir. And they have to take their masks off. They have to do a COVID test before they go inside. What was your thinking about starting at that point when I was going back through the collection of your comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, I came across the comic you did after 9 11. I came across all the sort of, like, contemporaneous strips in which characters were dealing with the Bush era and how that made them feel. What was your Covid thinking here?
- [08:41]
Alison Bechdel
It was funny because as soon as we were through the worst of COVID everyone, like, stopped talking about it.
- [08:48]
Gilbert Cruz
Sure.
- [08:48]
Alison Bechdel
And I was always curious about the way that had happened with the Spanish flu, Like the flu of 1918. I remember hearing people talk about how families just refused to talk about losing family members. Like the whole country was just having this, I don't know, shame reaction or grief, just trying to move on. And I feel like it's so important to remember the details of things. So while that whole, like, business with the COVID test might seem tedious or obvious, I feel like people aren't going to remember that. And it's important to get those things down. I always feel like I'm trying to archive the present moment in some way.
- [09:30]
Gilbert Cruz
I don't know that it seems silly because I feel like we actually haven't really grappled with that period at all. In most arts, there have been things here and there, but of course, you hear the stereotype. People saying, oh, I don't want to watch a movie with COVID in it. I don't want to read a book with COVID in it. Right. One, maybe me, says it's possibly one of the most meaningful or momentous moments in my life. I was part of an entire worldwide global pandemic. We were locked inside for long time periods, and we're just not going to talk about it much. We're just not going to. That's it. It's very odd to me.
- [10:12]
Alison Bechdel
Yeah. And that's how this wonderful opportunity for growth and progress got largely lost because we just refused to explore the possibilities.
- [10:24]
Gilbert Cruz
You have written in your memoirs, I think, very subtly about this dynamic in families, which is a family goes through a shared experience, and there are things we just don't talk about. Like, we all know it happened, but we don't talk about it. And it seems like, you know, this is that dynamic, but on a much larger scale.
- [10:41]
Alison Bechdel
Yeah, exactly. And that's One of the biggest lessons of my life was taking my own family's central secret and blowing it wide open. Like, not just talking about it with my family, but publishing a book about my father's homosexuality and suicide like that just broke all the rules of polite society and familial duty. But it. I don't know, it was ultimately a very positive thing for me to have done. Not quite sure about my family, but I think in the end for them as well.
- [11:18]
Gilbert Cruz
One of the things that happened as a result of the publication of that memoir, Fun Home, is that you became much more well known than you were previous to it. And one of the things that the Allison of your new book spent finds yourself grappling with is that success. What are the after effects of success, both artistically and financially? And readers can come to the book and see how the Alice in their grapples with it. I'm curious how that has played out in your own life.
- [11:47]
Alison Bechdel
I've had such a strange arc to my career. Like, I started out very much on the margins as this. Not just a lesbian outsider as a lesbian, but an outsider as a cartoonist. You couldn't get much more under the radar. But somehow both of those trajectories, stories about queer lives and the whole medium of comic books, just had this ascendancy. And I was at the juncture of those things at just the right moment. And I think that's what enabled my memoir, Fun Home, to cross over to this larger audience and get me out of just that subcultural niche. But it's weird, too, because that's where I formed my identity as an outsider, as someone who everybody had no plan of making any money. And then all of a sudden, I achieve this strange measure of material success. It's a little traumatic. I know that's not a. That's a very first world problem to have. But it's something I've been grappling with and trying to figure out for all.
- [12:52]
Gilbert Cruz
This, all these years, what has been the most troubling part of it for you?
- [12:58]
Alison Bechdel
I guess just the fact that the self I thought I was is now something else. I'm not an outsider in the way I once was, although I may soon be, as the right word crush continues. This is something Allison in the book is grappling with. Like she has a sister. I don't actually have a real sister, so that enabled me to explore this antipathy between them in a fun way. But her sister is a conservative. She's like a MAGA conservative who's actually trying to Get Alison's memoir band in her school district. But she's very like Allison. The two of them are very similar. The sister is a seed artist, Allison is a cartoonist, but they both have these kind of somewhat on the spectrum, kinds of creative pursuits. They're very similar in all their mental traits, but they're on opposite ends of the political spectrum. And Allison feels some. She always feels like everything is her fault. So she wonders if maybe her own success has somehow caused the rise of Trump. If a countercultural cartoonist, if this lesbian cartoonist can make it big while her very law abiding sister is struggling to eke out a living as an elementary school art teacher. What does that mean?
- [14:16]
Gilbert Cruz
Maybe it's easier to talk about the Allison in the book and how she feels. There's a moment earlier in the book when she sits down at the table with her friends who live in this fascinating living situation that we can get into, and they're making jokes about her money. You're like, oh, yeah, maybe you could fly us on your private plane or something. I may be completely misquoting that. And she still, she expresses still this discomfort, this. I know they're just trying to be funny and they're my friends and I've known them forever, but I don't know that I like that. We're still making fun of the fact that I have a little bit more money than they do.
- [14:51]
Alison Bechdel
She's uncomfortable. And in fact, that's another reason why this ended up not being a straight memoir. Because that feeling was perhaps a little too much to really dive deeply into. So I took this sort of circumvention around it by creating this whole fictional version.
- [15:10]
Gilbert Cruz
Is it easier to talk about our families and our lives and our feelings and it's talk about money? I feel like whether it's in romantic relationships or friend relationships, money is something people do not want to talk about.
- [15:24]
Alison Bechdel
I really thought in the early days of this project that I was going to do it, I was going to break the taboo, I was just going to go there. But as soon as I started, it was like, no, that's not going to go well. And I abandoned it. I don't know, maybe that's something in the future I will be able to pursue, but I just couldn't do it at this point.
- [15:45]
Gilbert Cruz
At some point in the future, you're gonna write a memoir and it's gonna be a meta memoir about your discomforts and then acceptance about how one needs to write about money. And it's gonna be about you writing this book, which is about a person named Alison writing a book about money.
- [16:01]
Alison Bechdel
That's right, yeah.
- [16:03]
Gilbert Cruz
We've planted the seed. You in this book, take your chapter titles, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, from Karl Marx. His book Das Kapital, Ulysses is threaded throughout Fun Home. There are many books threaded throughout Are youe My Mother, Virginia Woolf, and some other authors. How do you decide when to incorporate sort of literary influences, whether obviously or subtly into your books? And is it a balance where it's, this is too much. This is the right. This is enough. How do you make that decision?
- [16:35]
Alison Bechdel
I have to confess that the marks in this book Spent is a very light gloss. It doesn't really get into anything. Originally, when I was thinking of this book as a memoir, that was going to be my text. I was going to try to read Kapital. And honestly, picking up that tome and starting to flip through, it was like, no, there's no way I can do this. I don't have time. But I have spent lots of time doing that kind of research in my other projects, like for the memoir about my mother, I spent basically two years giving myself a tutorial on psychoanalysis and reading Freud and Winnicott. And with the book about my father, it was reading all of my dad's favorite authors and starting to discover what it was he loved about them as a way into telling his story. I love having those extra textual sources to play around with and just to learn. I just love reading and learning stuff. And then trying to fit it into my own narrative of my own life was always such a fun puzzle. So I thought I was going to be doing that with Marx and quickly gave up. And in the very final phase of writing the book, I jammed it back in by giving each of the chapters of the book a title from a chapter in Kapital, and not one that even has any bearing on what happens in that chapter. It's all just placeholders in a way.
- [18:04]
Gilbert Cruz
It reaches sort of its comic peak with a chapter title late in the book, that the title has like 60 words in it or something. I wish I could quote it right now, but I'll let people discover that one on their own.
- [18:17]
Alison Bechdel
I had to read that title, Gilbert, because there's gonna be an audiobook of this, and I play the narrator.
- [18:23]
Gilbert Cruz
Okay, wait, this is a very dumb question, so forgive me for asking it, but what is an audiobook of a graphic novel?
- [18:29]
Alison Bechdel
Oh, that is a really good question. And I didn't know. I haven't really seen anything like that. And the original plan was, I think, just to lift the text out of the book and have some actors read it. But that obviously did not work because there's so much going on in the drawings. That's just visual information that needed to somehow be conveyed in this audio version. So I had to basically rewrite it. I had to write a script that turned all the jokes into sound effects or extra dialogue or extra narration. It was a big, interesting project.
- [19:10]
Gilbert Cruz
So this, just to be clear, this is the first time you've done this?
- [19:13]
Alison Bechdel
Yes. I worked with the wonderful playwright Madeline George, who did an audiobook adaptation of Dykes to Watch Out For. So I learned how one does this from her.
- [19:24]
Gilbert Cruz
We'll be right back.
- [19:42]
Alison Bechdel
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- [20:10]
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- [21:12]
Gilbert Cruz
Welcome back. This is the Book Review Podcast and I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm joined this week by Alison Bechtel, author of the new graphic novel Spent. Speaking of Dykes, to watch out for your long running comic strip, we are getting to see several characters that readers of that comic got to know in Their youth, Sparrow, Stuart, Lois. There's a character JR that we meet when they are very young and then see here as a college student. And again, these are characters. They're in their late middle age. They are still passionate about their ideals. They're still incredibly, or they try to be incredibly involved in the world. Letter writing campaigns, going to meetings in order to speak out on topics that they care about. But of course, they're having to balance all that with the responsibilities and compromises of age. And you've said that you don't think about these characters when you're not writing these characters. But what is it like to sort of ramp back up for getting back into their lives now that they're in their late 50s, early 60s?
- [22:22]
Alison Bechdel
They're well into their 60s as I am. It was an interesting process. I stopped writing the comic strip in 2008, so 16 years ago. And yeah, I had not really thought much about them. I moved on to other things, but I just found that I needed their companionship right now. Part of the brainstorm of turning the book from a memoir into auto fiction was realizing that, oh my God, I can bring all my characters into this version. And so Holly's and my friends who live down the hill in Burlington, Vermont, are this group household who, you know, when I started writing the comic strip, when I was in my 20s, I actually lived in a group household like these people. But over the 25 years that I wrote my comic strip, they stayed living in it. I couldn't bear to break them up. And now here they still are in their 60s. And I've rationalized that by having them all be taking part in a University of Vermont Sociology Department longitudinal study on collective living. I don't think I could bear living in a collective house. But there's something also tremendously appealing about the community that these people have and the way that they don't live in a cut off, hermetically sealed suburban house in their romantic dyads. They're just. They're in a group, they're in a collective, which is very compelling.
- [23:46]
Gilbert Cruz
What is appealing? I asked this as someone who lives in a suburban house. What is appealing about the collective?
- [23:54]
Alison Bechdel
You're tied to life more vividly. I don't have children, so I guess children would tie you to life quite vividly. But just having other lives, other people's business coming and going constantly, there's just something very energizing and exciting about that. And the whole sort of arc of this book is Allison's realization that she is not out there on her own, she's working with these other people. That's all she has to do is to pitch in with them. She doesn't have to fix everything herself, which is how she feels. But of course, she can't actually do that. So that's why she's so paralyzed and unhappy.
- [24:34]
Gilbert Cruz
The character in your strip, Mo, was an avatar for you. Is Allicen older Mo, or is she a different character?
- [24:43]
Alison Bechdel
Essentially, there is no Mo in this book because I didn't need her. Because, yes, I myself am there, moving. I created her as a version of myself. But over the run of that comic strip, over those 25 years that I was doing it, I turned from the character Mo into Mo's girlfriend Sydney, who was the new women's studies professor on campus, this sort of jaded, cynical smartass. I feel like I turned into that somewhat more negative, less earnest character with time. And now I feel like I'm a fusion of both of them. And so Allison in the book is both of those things.
- [25:26]
Gilbert Cruz
You also said once in a New Yorker profile that all these characters are. You essentially said all the characters in Dykes are more or less me, which maybe makes sense. Which does make sense, yeah.
- [25:38]
Alison Bechdel
I mean, in order to write about anyone who wasn't me, I had to just find some point of commonality with them. So I think that's just what writers do.
- [25:47]
Gilbert Cruz
Did you feel with each of these characters again, Ginger, Sparrow, and all of them, that you were able to get back into your mind and say, this is where I left them in 2008. This is where we started with them in the early 80s. And this is the type of person that they would be now in the mid-2020s.
- [26:07]
Alison Bechdel
I didn't do a lot of character study. They basically are the same people they always were, and they're doing the same kind of work they were doing back then when I left off. Sparrow works for Planned Parenthood. Stuart's organizing Ukrainian relief efforts. Lois has become the Ed of the local queer youth organization. Ginger's in the trenches at the university. They're all still doing what they were doing.
- [26:36]
Gilbert Cruz
So one of the other characters that we get to know is J.R. child of Stuart and Sparrow. They go off to college. They leave college after a while, and they arrive in the life of Alison, not surprisingly, with the most young person, progressive language that you've ever heard. Alison and J.R. lived together at one point, and it's very funny, but also, I think, very reflective of the way young people see the world now. You have all these older characters and Then you have this wonderful younger character and their sort of quasi romantic partner. What it was like to write those characters.
- [27:13]
Alison Bechdel
Oh man, it was so fun. I love those kids. In a way, I was indulging my own regrets at not having had children. Like I was allowing myself to have these kind of vicarious children move into my yurt at the farm. But yeah, JR and their polycule partner Badger have both just dropped out of Oberlin. They're just partly they're disillusioned with college, but also their polycule kind of broke up and that was devastating to them. So they've dropped out and they're working on their podcast Polycrisis and they're like the only people really with a big view. The adults are all funneled into their various activities, but the young people really have some perspective on things that I think we could all benefit from.
- [28:03]
Gilbert Cruz
What do you think? The. If we're talking about the generational difference between Allison or Mo and Ginger and Sparrow and Stewart and how they thought about being progressive and thought about engaging with the world that they wanted to change when they were young and JR and Badger, the way they do it, what do you see as the difference there?
- [28:27]
Alison Bechdel
One thing is we saw JR's childhood. JR was like a very willful little kid and somewhat spoiled by Stuart's overindulgence. So that dynamic continues to play out here. JR is a child of activists and learned all of this stuff at their parents feet and is now carrying on, but in a more radical way. Like Stuart is organizing these get out the vote letter writing campaigns. But JR is doing abortion pill packing parties, like something more risky, something actually illegal, doing civil disobedience and doing a climate protest. So there's a little more urgency, I think, that the young people are feeling than my generation did.
- [29:17]
Gilbert Cruz
You mentioned earlier Alison's sister Sheila. Sheila loves her lesbian sister, but she also watches Fox News all the time. She's part of a Moms for Liberty type group. She's anti abortion, and even though her beliefs run counter to Allison's and those of her queer liberal friends in Vermont, not surprisingly, given your other work, you give her just a huge amount of humanity and certainly in the latter part of the book, an inner life. And I was curious how you wanted the two of those characters to play off of each other.
- [29:47]
Alison Bechdel
I'm glad that's what came through because that's what I wanted to do. I feel like one of the most critical things we can do right now is to bridge that polarization gap. And if I'm Only doing it fictionally, at least that's something. But yeah, Allison comes to really understand. Sheila is her own person with her own life and her own perspective. And she doesn't change Sheila. She tries or fantasizes about changing Sheila's politics, but they just eventually have to agree to disagree but maintain their some measure of intimacy, which is, I think, what we all have to do. And there's so many of our families that are riven by this bull.
- [30:35]
Gilbert Cruz
There was an interview where you were talking about this book. It hadn't come out yet, and you said, I felt like I'm going to do a Tintin adventure, but for adults. You were talking about color specifically, which really pops here in a way that it hasn't, I don't think, in your previous work. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you have decided to incorporate color, use color over the course of your career. You started in black and white, and then now when you did Fun Home, are you my mother? And then the secret to superhuman strength, that started to change and we've arrived at the book now where it's just. It's so bright and fun to look at.
- [31:13]
Alison Bechdel
Initially, I feel like I became a cartoonist in order to avoid color. Like back in the pre digital era when I started cartooning, pretty much all you could do was black and white. And I loved black and white. My father had traumatized me about color as a child by coloring in my coloring books, like showing me how to do it and doing these beautiful techniques. And it was like, oh my God, dad, really? So I was like, out on color. Forget it. But over time, and also as we entered the digital era and color became cheaper and easier to use, I got pushed and got interested in exploring it further. It's a huge amount of work. It's a whole, like, it doubles the work of the drawing in many ways. But I've been really lucky because my partner Holly has been doing that. She colored superhuman strength with watercolor and now she colored this book with Photoshop, which is a really different look. Much more conventional comic book look like the Tintin comics. And what I loved about Tintins when I was younger was not just the beautiful color, but just how immersive these stories were. They would be these like, I don't know, 60 to 80 page adventures that you could just get lost in. And they were so beautifully written and drawn. They were just much more absorbing than the regular comic books I was reading. I don't know, Richie Rich or something. So, yeah, I always felt Like I wanted to do that. Make a world compelling and seductive.
- [32:45]
Gilbert Cruz
I would love to ask you a question about the physicality of drawing. I don't know, the way you sit, the way you have to sit or hunch or. That's maybe different than it would be for a writer. Like what? What is that? Do you have aches and pains? Has it done something to your body? What positions do you find yourself in when you're working on these books?
- [33:06]
Alison Bechdel
I have a really funny process. I'm careful ergonomically, but also I naturally mix up what I'm doing all the time. Like when I'm drawing. Yeah. I'm hunched over my drawing board one second, but the next moment I'm leaping up to take a reference shot of myself doing some pose that my character needs to be in. So it's very physical. It's very almost aerobic sometimes, all this running around. And it prevents repetitive stress injuries in a great way. But, yeah, comics is a really physical way of writing, and it results in a very embodied kind of writing, like where you're just seeing people's. The physical material details of their lives and their sensual reality in a way that you don't when it's just words on the page.
- [33:57]
Gilbert Cruz
I want to ask you a question just because we did a podcast earlier this year about the 100th anniversary of Edward Gorey, who's just one of my favorites of all time, and I've seen you talk about him, and I'm just wondering if you could just tell me what you love about him and his work.
- [34:18]
Alison Bechdel
This book spent is an extended riff on Gorey's first illustrated novel, the Unstrung Harp. Do you remember that one about Mr. Eargrass?
- [34:27]
Gilbert Cruz
I certainly do, yeah.
- [34:29]
Alison Bechdel
God, I love that book so much.
- [34:31]
Gilbert Cruz
This is about a writer who is having trouble writing.
- [34:35]
Alison Bechdel
Yes. The most insightful portrait of the creative process I have ever seen that. What's funniest about it to me somehow, is this the way that purportedly omniscient narration keeps Veering into Mr. Ebras own consciousness in this just hilarious way. And that kind of happens in my book too, where Alice and the character and the narrator of this book are a little unclear where one stops and the other starts, but Gory is just my hero.
- [35:07]
Gilbert Cruz
The Unstrung harp aside. Is it the tone of his stuff? Is it the drawing itself? Is it what's. Maybe it all works in concert, but what has always been the appeal for you?
- [35:18]
Alison Bechdel
Yeah, I think that the tone. Part of the tone is his drawings and these weird, oblique expressions people are making that don't quite connect with what the words say. There's something that goes on in that space that is just so potent and transfixing.
- [35:38]
Gilbert Cruz
I want to end by talking briefly about Fun Home. We tried to get in touch, you and I, last year when Fun Home ended up on a project that the Book Review did, looking at what a panel of 500 writers and literary luminaries had picked as the best books of the 21st century so far. So these are peers of yours, as opposed to a panel of just critics, which is normally what we would have done in the past. And Fun Home was on there and it was not surprising to me. I'm wondering what you continue to hear about this book long after you first published it, long after the Broadway musical came out. How does it continue to resonate as you understand it in the world?
- [36:23]
Alison Bechdel
It's so wild to me what has happened with that book? I actually have started teaching recently and it's so funny to meet students, these young college kids who tell me that this book was formative for them. That is just a remarkable thing to experience. I never know quite what to do with it, but I don't know. Look, I'm rendered speechless. It's especially funny because Fun Home is about my own, like, search for queer history and queer literature and finding the well of loneliness, this super depressing book. And I guess I feel happy that I've made a more fun, exciting book for young people to land on. But mostly I'm just really, I just feel very fortunate that that book made its way in the world.
- [37:18]
Gilbert Cruz
Allison Bechtel, author of Fun Home and the New Book Spent A Comic Novel thank you so much for joining the Book Review podcast.
- [37:29]
Alison Bechdel
Thank you, Gilbert.
- [37:32]
Gilbert Cruz
That was my conversation with Alison Bechtel about her new book, A Comic Novel. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thanks for listening.