Alison Bechdel

I've been obsessing about Alison Bechdel since I read her excellent memoir Fun Home a few months ago. I've been looking forward to her reading at the Free Library basically since then, and I wasn't disappointed. I have a bit of an author crush on Alison. Basically, I would really like to be friends with her. That's one of my goals in life -- someday I would like to know her for real instead of just pretending I know her. I feel like I know her from reading her blog, where militant hardcore feminist commenters recently chastised her for using the word "man", as in "Man! I was in the airport a long time the other day." The blog commenter people were supposed to be wearing red carnations, but I didn't spot any of them. I feel bad for her because it seems like her moves are sometimes constrained by her longtime audience, and they can be pretty hard on her and each other in the blog comments.

She read a section from the memoir, projecting images onto a big screen and reading the captions, but not the text within the squares. It was even more powerful to see the enlarged images and to hear her read about her father's suicide by Mack truck. She read one section and then talked about her process. I've mentioned it here before -- the way she acts out every scene so she can draw accurately -- but it was fascinating to see her sketches and photographs.

Things I learned about the way she works: to save time, she created a text font based on her own handwriting instead of hand-lettering. First she wrote down a bunch of random memories about her family. Then she mapped the text in Adobe Illustrator. She did pencil sketches of the panels, then layered with tracing paper, getting more and more detailed. She inked and scanned the pages, then shaded another layer and combined everything in Photoshop. The book has roughly 1,000 panels, all worked in the same painstaking way. She went off on some crazy project tangents, like renting Godard's movie Breathless and taking screen shots of it to get views of a road in Paris. She also re-drew an Addams Family cartoon exactly so she could include it without feeling guilty. The best part was seeing one of the photographs she had copied for a chapter title page.

She read another section and then took questions. The most interesting was when a high school friend of her father stood up and introduced himself. Alison recognized his name, but she didn't know him. He talked about a group of her father's high school friends, including one who was a doctor at the hospital where Alison's father was taken, still alive, after his "accident". It was chilling when he said that -- I don't think Fun Home mentions that the father didn't die instantly. The friend said he was sorry, that he didn't know the whole story about Alison's father, but that at least Alison's mother and father had raised a beautiful, intelligent, talented daughter, so something good came from their sad story. It was touching/amazing/scary when he stood up and spoke. Alison thanked him for his comments, and seemed glad that he was there.

She was in charge of her crowd, though. She handled each question thoughtfully, but didn't try too hard to answer the stupid ones. She expressed regret about hurting her family -- it's almost a violent act to write about other people, she said. She never expected Fun Home to be such a huge hit. But I think she feels the downside was worth it, in the interest of getting as close to the truth as possible, and honoring her father in that way.

I stood in line and had her sign my book, and of course I sort of babbled about how I loved her book and her blog. She's gorgeous, sort of in spite of herself. Or maybe she's handsome. Or maybe it doesn't matter which -- she's very attractive. She dresses in men's clothes and has a man's haircut, and has this force of personality that makes her sort of shine.

I felt lucky to get to see her, and I think we're all lucky that she's working the way she does, an archivist of her own remarkable life. If I had the money I'd buy all the Dykes to Watch Out For books. As it is, I'll just keep reading the blog and trying to write something half as good as Fun Home.