JUNE 2 ¡006 justout 55
books
Close to Home
Dykes to Watch Out For creator turns the pen on herself
by Kathy Beige
fter more than 20 years of chronicling
the lesbian community in her Dykes to
Watch Out For comic strip, Alison
Bechdel has turned the pen on herself.
references to classics that might be intimidating to
the average DTWOF fan. Camus, Fitzgerald and
Proust are cited for the similarities to her fathers life.
As for Bechdel, writing the memoir was both a
blessing and a curse. She always felt it was a story
She has written a graphic memoir,
that needed to be told, but the process took her
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, about the relation seven years. First she started with writing the text.
ship she had growing up with her father, a closeted
“I just sat in my basement and worked at it,” she
gay man. Bechdel discovered his sexual orientation
says. The comic strip writer had to learn a whole
just as she was coming out herself and right before
new way to tell a story. “My comic strip is mostly
his death.
dialogue and mostly silly. A lot of [Fun Home] is
The dark and serious tale is quite a departure
not dialogue but narration.”
from her comic strip. We peek into Bechdel’s early
In addition to learning to write a new way, creat
life with a controlling father and distant mother. It
ing the book was a tedious process. For every panel in
is at times brutally honest and intellectually chal the book, Bechdel posed and took a digital picture to
lenging. Literature was a key way Bechdel and her
reference in her drawing. “My intention was not to
father related, and the memoir is littered with
act out every scene, but I did
I WASSPARJXWTOM*FATHER'SATHEHWA. MODERNTO HIS VICTORIAN.
pretty much do that. It was a
side effect of my crazy compul
sive drawing technique.”
Another side effect tvas
that Bechdel put herself in the
position of acting out her
parents’ relationship. “An
unintended consequence of
this technique is that it
immerses me in the world of
my story. I’m embodying my
parents having an argument,”
she says. “It gives me emotion
al access to the story.”
BOTCH TO K® MPU-T.
UTtCITARIAN TO HIS AESTHETE.
Bechdel says she uses the
same technique to create her
A
Alison Bechdel spent seven years writing and drawing her memoir.
You
antidote to my pain,” she says. “It was this great
exciting party that I could join.”
Yet, there were times where her father’s control
ling ways held her back. “When he died, there was
no one to tell me what to do. At the time I thought
it was really great. But when I look back, I realize I
was really aimless.
“I don’t think he would have a lot of respect for
me and the choices I made,” she continues. “He
really valued • traditional establishment kind of
career path.”
Writing a lesbian comic strip is not a tradition
al career path, but it has earned Bechdel some lev
el of fame and success. Since 1983 she has been
churning out two Dykes to Watch Out For comic
strips each month. Her characters have changed
and evolved along with the lesbian community—
dealing with the closure of women’s bookstores,
breast cancer, trans issues and cunent political
events.
“I’m not a news junkie," Bechdel says. “But I do
force myself to read the news. I have a regimen of
media intake that I force myself to follow."
She also has an Excel spreadsheet to keep track
of all the characters and their storylines. She
doesn’t have the storylines mapped out in advance,
but she does have ideas of where she would like
them to go. “I can’t write too far ahead because 1 try
to tie the story in to current events,” she says.
Most people assume Bechdel most resembles
Mo in her strip, but she disagrees. “1 used to be
more like Mo, but now I’m more Sydney,” she says,
referring to the materialistic dyke who runs up her
credit cards on all the latest technology toys.
“I always give Sydney things in the strip a cou
ple of years before I’m able to afford them,”
Bechdel says, “like a cell phone, a flat-screen TV.
But I’ve also gotten very jaded like Sydney.’ ©
A1.1SON B echdel reads from Fun Home: A Family
Tragicomic 7:30 p.m. June 15 at Powell’s,
1005 W. Bumside St.
Portland freelance writer K athy B elge dishes out
queer advice and humor from a hutch perspective for
Curve magazine. Visit her online at
www.hpstickdipstick.com.
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biweekly comic strip. She calls it her “barely
harnessed obsessive-compulsive disorder.”
“Part of what motivates me to draw is this urge
to capture a little bit of real life in tiny black-and-
white drawing. It calms me down,” she says.
But she has to keep it in check. “If 1 were to
start drawing something that I’m looking at right
now, it could take me the rest of my life. There’s
that much detail. For me, the big challenge is
knowing when to stop. If I’m drawing a bookshelf
in the background, do I draw all the books? Do I
include the title from the spine? Do I include logos
of the publishers on the spine?”
Bechdel acknowledges that her attention to
detail is one of the things that fans love about her
work. “It’s a delicate balance,” she says. “If I put too
much in there, it will be utterly illegible.”
Although Bechdel loves writing her comic
strip, she did find the process of writing a full-
length book freeing. She says: “1 have so many
square inches in which to tell a complete story
every two weeks. Suddenly I had 240 pages to fill.
It was how I imagine it must feel to get out of
prison after being in for a long time.”
She is proud of her efforts. “I made a book,” she
says. “A novelist just writes down some words and
sends it off. I actually made this book with my
hands. 1 know intimately what fell on each square
inch of each page.”
The story is cyclical, spiraling back over the
events of Bechdel’s life. “I felt telling a simple
chronological story wasn’t going to work because it
was too complicated,” she says. “I ended up moving
in a spiral. Instead of following a linear trajectory,
the story goes like a labyrinth, spiraling into a
central core and then back out again over the same
turf.”
One of the themes Bechdel explores in her
memoir is the parallel lives she and her father were
living. She was coming out just as she discovered
her father was gay and probably having affairs with
underage boys. “In some way, I feel like I’ve been
trying to avenge his death,” she says.
One way she did that was to immerse herself
into the gay and lesbian community of the early
1980s. “The whole queer subculture that I discov
ered at that age right after he died was a huge
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