Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel (/ˈbɛkdəl/ BEK-dəl; born September 10, 1960) is an American cartoonist. Originally best known for the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, she came to critical and commercial success in 2006 with her graphic memoir Fun Home, which was subsequently adapted as a musical. She is a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Award.

<span id="Early_life">Early life

Alison Bechdel was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Helen Augusta (née Fontana) and Bruce Allen Bechdel. Her family was Roman Catholic, and her parents were teachers. Bechdel's brother is keyboard player John Bechdel, who has worked with many bands including Fear Factory, Ministry, Prong and Killing Joke. Her family also owned and operated a funeral home. She attended Simon's Rock College and then Oberlin College, graduating in 1981.

Career

Bechdel moved to Manhattan and applied to many art schools but was rejected and worked in a number of office jobs in the publishing industry.

She began Dykes to Watch Out For as a single drawing labeled "Marianne, dissatisfied with the morning brew: Dykes to Watch Out For, plate no. 27". An acquaintance recommended she send her work to Womannews, a feminist newspaper, which published her first work in its June 1983 issue. Bechdel gradually moved from her early single-panel drawings to multi-paneled strips. After a year, other outlets began running the strip.

In the first years, Dykes to Watch Out For consisted of unconnected strips without a regular cast or serialized storyline. However, its structure eventually evolved into a focus on following a set group of lesbian characters. In 1986 Firebrand Books published a collection of the strips to date. In 1987 Bechdel introduced her regular characters, Mo and her friends, while living in St. Paul, Minnesota. Dykes to Watch Out For is the origin of the "Bechdel test," which has become a frequently used metric in cultural discussion of film. In 1988, she began a short-lived page-length strip about the staff of a queer newspaper, titled "Servants to the Cause", for The Advocate. Bechdel has also written and drawn autobiographical strips and has done illustrations for magazines and websites. She became a full-time cartoonist in 1990 and later moved near Burlington, Vermont. She currently resides in Bolton, Vermont. In 2012, Bechdel was a Mellon Residential Fellow for Arts and Practice at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center at the University of Chicago and co-taught "Lines of Transmission: Comics & Autobiography" with Professor Hillary Chute.

In November 2006 Bechdel was invited to sit on the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.

She received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle in 2012.

She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2014.

Fun Home

In 2006, Bechdel published Fun Home, an autobiographical "tragicomic" chronicling her childhood and the years before and after her father's death. Fun Home has received more widespread mainstream attention than Bechdel's earlier work, with reviews in Entertainment Weekly, People and several features in The New York Times. Fun Home spent two weeks on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction bestseller list.

Fun Home was hailed as one of the best books of 2006 by numerous sources, including The New York Times, amazon.com, The Times of London, Publishers Weekly, salon.com, New York magazine, and Entertainment Weekly.

Time magazine named Alison Bechdel's Fun Home number one of its "10 Best Books of the Year." Lev Grossman and Richard LeCayo described Fun Home as "the unlikeliest literary success of 2006," and called it "a stunning memoir about a girl growing up in a small town with her cryptic, perfectionist dad and slowly realizing that a) she is gay and b) he is too. ... Bechdel's breathtakingly smart commentary duets with eloquent line drawings. Forget genre and sexual orientation: this is a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other."

Fun Home was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award in the memoir/autobiography category. It also won the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work. Fun Home was also nominated for the Best Graphic Album award, and Bechdel was nominated for Best Writer/Artist.

In 2014, the Republican-led South Carolina House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee cut the College of Charleston's funding by $52,000, the cost of the summer reading program, to punish the college for selecting Fun Home for a reading program.

Are You My Mother?

Dykes to Watch Out For was suspended in 2008 so that Bechdel could work on her second graphic memoir, Are You My Mother?, which was released in May 2012. It focuses on her relationship with her mother. Bechdel described its themes as "the self, subjectivity, desire, the nature of reality, that sort of thing," which is a paraphrase of a quote from Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse.

The story's dramatic action is multi-layered, and divides into a number of narrative strands:

• Bechdel's phone-conversations with her mother in the present.
• Bechdel's memories of interactions with her mother during childhood, and an earlier adulthood.
• Bechdel's therapy sessions, whose primary content is composed of analysis of her relationship with her mother.
• Bechdel's richly imagined, but also diligently researched, historical portrayals of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, and author Virginia Woolf, spliced together with Bechdel's own therapeutic journey with text from the psychoanalytic writings of Alice Miller, along with the story of Bechdel's own reading-through and relating to the works of Sigmund Freud.

An excerpt of the book entitled "Mirror" was included in the Best American Comics 2013, edited by Jeff Smith. This episode riffs heavily on psychoanalytic themes quoted explicitly from the work of psychoanalysts Alice Miller and Winnicott.

Personal life

Bechdel came out as a lesbian at age 19. Bechdel's gender and sexual identity are a large part of the core message of her work. "The secret subversive goal of my work is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings." In February 2004, Bechdel married her girlfriend since 1992, Amy Rubin, in a civil ceremony in San Francisco. However, all same-sex marriage licenses given by the city at that time were subsequently voided by the California Supreme Court. Bechdel and Rubin separated in 2006. According to her mother's obituary, as of 2013, Bechdel lives in Bolton, Vermont with her partner, Holly Rae Taylor.

Selected works

• Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton Mifflin, 2006, ISBN 0-618-47794-2)
• Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012, ISBN 0-618-98250-7)

See also

• Women in comics
• Bechdel Test

References

Further reading

• Chute, Hillary L. (2010). Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-15062-0. Retrieved 6 September 2011. 

External links

• Official website
• "Stuck in Vermont 109: Alison Bechdel" 2008 Eva Sollberger
• George, Rachel. 10 Reasons to Love: Alison Bechdel, For Books' Sake