How characters from Alison Bechdel's past shook her out of her memoir-writing kick

CBC

2 days ago

Nearly 20 years after her breakout memoir, Fun Home, American cartoonist Alison Bechdel is still unearthing new truths about that period of her life.
But this time, she's taking a look at her personal story through fiction, with her new comic novel, Spent.
In Spent, she explores the life of a cartoonist, also named Alison Bechdel, who grapples with her complicated relationship with capitalism, community and activism after the success of her memoir and its subsequent TV adaptation.
"When I was younger, I did lead a more communal life," Bechdel said on Bookends with Mattea Roach.
"I lived in a communal house. I went out and did political activities and was involved in my community. Over time, I really stopped doing that — and it's a bunch of factors. Part of it's getting older, part of it is being in a relationship, but a big part of it was that I was living very much on the edge until I was in my 40s, until Fun Home came out, and slowly saved my financial bacon."
"Then I started making a lot of money, which was a very weird experience for someone who had formed their sense of self as an outsider and especially as a poor outsider."
Bechdel, who is also known for her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and books Are You My Mother? and The Secret to Superhuman Strength, joined Roach to revisit her debut memoir and how it shaped her return to fiction.
Mattea Roach: You published your memoir, Fun Home, almost 20 years ago when you were 45. Now you're in your 60s. How has your relationship with the text evolved over the past nearly two decades?
Alison Bechdel: It's funny to have this thing, this record of my life that is unchanging, like it's cast in stone. Even though I have found out lots of interesting information about various people or scenes in the book that would change the story if I were to write it now, it's done. This is the record and it's very odd to have to be constantly talking about it.
The book was published almost 20 years ago, but I'm still talking about it as if it's a new thing to people. So that's a funny activity to get one's head around.
How did it come about that you learned new information about some of the stuff that's depicted in the book? Was it a situation where people you knew read the book and said that's not actually how it was?
I'll tell you one example of that, which is that I learned from my mother's best friend, that on the day that my father died, she had decided to not divorce him.
Wow. Your dad died when he was hit by a truck and that was two weeks after your mom had asked for a divorce. And then there's some significant suggestion that it might have actually been intentional on his part.
In this tumultuous time around between when I came out to my parents and when he died, which was just a couple of months, my mother had asked him for a divorce. And now I find out that she had been going to call that off.
It just just casts her whole story into this really different light. It was already quite a tragic story, but now it's even worse, you know?
Fun Home was made into this Broadway musical in 2015 and it won five Tonys. It's a very different work despite being adapted from your memoir. How did it feel to hand over a project that was so personal to be adopted for another medium?
I didn't really know what I was doing. I knew I had sort of sidestepped an offer to option it for a film by asking for more money than they were willing to pay me. Which was a great relief.
But then this offer came up for a musical and I didn't really have a connection to musicals. I've seen musicals, but I'm not like a big musical person. Somehow it seemed like it was different enough that I wouldn't mind if someone made a really bad musical out of my book — and the way that I would mind if it were a really bad film adaptation.
I don't know what I was thinking now, but fortunately, that didn't happen.
The people who made it did a very good job. It's a really good adaptation, but I always sort of think, "Wow, that was lucky." In my new book Spent, I explore what it would be like to really lose control of a creative project.
Why did you want to explore this alternate path that you're grateful, in your real life, to not have gone down?
Well, partly because once you become a writer in this world, everyone expects you to then somehow do something for TV or the great triumph is to get your book turned into a TV show and that just always strikes me as funny. Why can't we just make comic books that are comic books?
I guess, obviously, because you make more money, but it's also just a cultural phenomenon. You know that if you're a writer, you have to grapple with this.
Why did you want to revisit these characters from your weekly comic strips Dykes to Watch Out For who are now in late middle-age but are still living together in a communal housing situation?
This book, Spent, was going to be another memoir. That's what I started doing after my comic strip. I retired the comic strip and began writing books about my life. And I thought that's what I was going to do forever because I really liked writing about actual life.
Occasionally, someone would ask me, do you ever think you'll do fiction again? And I would just go blank. Fiction? How do you do that? And I couldn't even remember that I had actually done this fictional comic strip.
But I realized early on in the work for this book that doing it as a memoir was going to be really boring. I just somehow didn't want to write about my actual life or actually read Marx or all the things I would have to do to intelligently discuss money or capitalism. In the moment that I threw that idea away, this other idea came in.
What would really be funny is if I wrote about a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel who was trying to write a book about money and then it just all sort of sprang to life — and in that new vision, there were my old comic strip characters who were going to be my friends.
It just was one of those lovely moments when something just comes into your mind fully formed, which hardly ever happens to me.