Bechdel, Alison
Born: September 10, 1960, in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania
Vocations: Memoirist, Cartoonist, Rights Activist
Geographic Connection to Pennsylvania: Beech Creek & Lock Haven, Clinton County
Keywords: Beech Creek; Dykes to Watch Out For, Fun Home; Graphic Memoir; Oberlin College; Simon’s Rock Early College
Abstract: Alison Bechdel was born September 10, 1960 in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. She grew up in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania and attended high school where both of her parents taught English literature. After college, she began cartooning lesbian-centered comic strips, called Dykes to Watch Out For. They were later compiled into books. She also wrote and drew Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, a graphic memoir chronicling her troubling relationship with her father. It explores her Coming Out Story, as well as her father’s mysterious life and death. After twenty five years, Dykes to Watch Out For is still popular in 2009.
Biography:
On September 10, 1960, Alison Bechdel was born to Bruce and Helen Bechdel in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. Less than ten miles away, Beech Creek, Pennsylvania was her home for most of her childhood. Bechdel rejected stereotypical “girl” behavior by keeping her hair short and playing with boys. She also spent much of her time with her brothers, one older and one younger, helping her father, an antiques collector, by gathering antiques to restore their 4,000-square-foot, Gothic Revival mansion to its original 1880s form. Her father was a funeral home director, and he used their house as the funeral home, which Bechdel and her brothers aptly, yet ironically, named “Fun Home.” Her mother was an actress and taught English literature at their local high school, just as her father did.
Bechdel began drawing at the age of three, and she still has the drawings to prove it. The evolution of her drawings can be found in The Indelible Alison Bechdel: Confessions, Comix, and Miscellaneous Dykes to Watch Out For. In this semi-autobiographical work, she states, “I spent the better part of my childhood holed up in makeshift offices that I would construct around the house, drawing under a high-intensity lamp, refining my technique on reams and reams of typing paper.” Bechdel would simply draw figure after figure with no regard to the necessity of a background. Soon came a realization: all of the figures she had drawn were males. Growing up as a child in the 60s, she became aware that “boys, even when they were bad, were good. And when girls were bad...they were really bad.” In order to cope with this, Bechdel abandoned the female identity forced upon her; namely, she began carrying a pocket knife, cut her hair short, and began to spit occasionally. “I continued using the girls’ bathroom and checking the female box on questionnaires. But in my head I occupied my own private Switzerland, where I spent the remainder of my childhood in splendid neutrality.”
In an attempt to imitate boys, Bechdel began reading comics. “I grew up with MAD Magazine. That was a very big influence graphically, and that whole satiric sensibility.” Bechdel, during her most formative years, would also be heavily influenced by Charles Addams, famous for The Addams Family comic strips, and Edward Gorey, an illustrator also known for his dark subject matter.
Bechdel would eventually attend the local high school where her parents taught. She states, “The pressure to conform was savage in my small, farm-country high school.” To go to school, she would do her hair, make-up, and wear earrings. She would later confess, “After a long day of being a model teenage girl, I would come home and release my manic, pent-up energy through my fountain pen.” She later attended Simon’s Rock Early College. At college, she was free from the strain of being conventional, able to once again be her “gender-neutral self.” She graduated in 1979. After spending her first two years at college uncertain of her sexual orientation, she realized she was a lesbian.
The lack of women in her drawings puzzled Bechdel because they were the subjects she was truly interested in. Her first attempts at drawing women were stiff and just looked like men. The more she became comfortable with her identity, through reading and attending the on campus GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender) group’s meetings, the more she wanted to tell her family. Trepidation and distance caused Bechdel to be unable to tell them in person, so she wrote a letter addressed to her mother. Several days later she received a phone call from her father. He was happy and accepted her; unfortunately, her mother did not and refused to speak to her. After a week, Bechdel received a phone call from her mother, where she revealed her husband’s affairs with young men. Bechdel had never felt so close to her father, as she later chronicled in Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, a graphic memoir about her relationship with her father. Just a few days later, her father was hit by a Stroehmann’s Sunbeam Bread truck. He died instantly. After his funeral, Bechdel returned to school and graduated from Oberlin College with a Bachelor’s degree in 1981.
After college, she moved to New York City. When her applications to graduate art programs were rejected, she sought jobs in the publishing industry and became a word processor for several years. She moved to Hadley, MA for a year and then moved to Minneapolis, MN and became a production manager for the weekly Equal Time for four years. Somewhere in between, she discovered Howard Cruise’s Gay Comix. She explained in The Indelible…, “That was a pivotal moment because I discovered all these gay and lesbian cartoonists who were writing about their own experiences. It made me realize I could do that too, and that’s when I started my strip.” Her friend received a letter from Bechdel that had featured a doodle in the margin. At the behest of her friend, she submitted a drawing to Womanews where she interned. The comic strip garnered acclaim at Womanews, the monthly feminist newspaper, when it was published in 1983. From a drawing in the margin of a letter addressed to her friend to filling sketchbooks with drawings and captions, Dykes to Watch Out For was created. She was later contacted, after a year doing biweekly comic strips for Womanews, it was syndicated in 1985, and then Firebrand Books released a collection of her strips, titled, Dykes to Watch Out For, which came out in 1986. Finally, she returned to New York City in 1990.
After having done Dykes to Watch Out For for over fifteen years, she still felt the weight of her father’s alternating praise and discouragement in her endeavors even though he had been dead for many years. She had tried to tell her story through prose in her early twenties, but to no avail. With the skills of an expert cartoonist, she decided to take up this task again. Little did she know that seven years of sifting through haunting memories and clues about the “death” of her father lay ahead of her. She eventually and successfully turned her relationship with her father into a graphic memoir, a narrative related through a combination of text and art in comic strip form. It took so long because she would rediscover memories about her father that were representative of his personality (namely, the perfectionism he would demonstrate when criticizing her) and would finely weave them with her own Coming Out Story. Bechdel also explores her theories on his death, or possible suicide, in Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.
Seven years of work would pay off. Several publications, including The New York Times, Amazon.com, The Times of London, New York magazine, hailed it as one of the best books of 2006 and Publishers Weekly ranked it as the best comic book of 2006. According to Kirkus Reviews, “Bechdel’s memoir offers a graphic narrative of uncommon richness, depth, literary resonance, and psychological complexity . . . Though this will likely be stocked with graphic novels, it shares as much in spirit with the work of Mary Karr, Tobias Wolff, and other contemporary memoirists of considerable literary accomplishment.” Another reviewer, Chip Kidd, author of The Cheese Monkeys, had this to say about Fun Home: “Stupendous. Alison Bechdel’s mesmerizing feat of familial resurrection is a rare, prime example of why graphic novels have taken over the conversation about American literature. The details — visual and verbal, emotional and elusive — are devastatingly captured by an artist in total control of her craft.” In a video interview with Eva Sollberger, titled Stuck in Vermont, from December 2008, Alison Bechdel revealed that Fun Home will be made into a musical.
Most recently, Bechdel has authored a comic strip regarding Vermont, where she currently lives, titled, “Vermont: Green Mountains.” It was her contribution to Weiland & Wilsey’s State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. This collection showcases 50 writers on 50 states, including Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, Jonathan Franzen, award-winning novelist of The Corrections, Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning book for Fiction The Interpreter of Maladies, and Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to The End, a finalist for the National Book Award. She also continues to write and draw Dykes to Watch Out For. “The strip is about all kinds of things,” she was quoted in an interview in the British publication Independent on Sunday, “not just gay and lesbian issues, although the world is seen through that lens. These events—births, deaths and everything in-between—happen to everyone.” Later, in the same article, she told readers that her great-aunt lived to be 110 years old. She joked, “I have a hazy fantasy about lying on my deathbed when I’m 117 and completing the last panel.”
Works:
Collections
Graphic Memoir
Stories
Sources:
For More Information:
This biography was prepared by John Alvarez, Spring 2009.