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CBC
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- CBC
How characters from Alison Bechdel's past shook her out of her memoir-writing kick
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.
CBC
23-05-2025
- CBC
Vijay Khurana's novel asks what we can learn from young men who murder
In Vijay Khurana's novel The Passenger Seat, he tells a story about high school friends Teddy and Adam. Not yet men, but no longer boys, they set off on a road trip in search of freedom and self-discovery. But the further they go, the more lost they become, until they head down a road from which there's no coming back. The Passenger Seat draws on aspects from the 2019 real-life manhunt for two men from Vancouver Island who murdered three people in northern B.C. — with no traceable motive. "I don't think that I have specific answers about how young men behave in these ways," said Khurana on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "That's one of the reasons why I know that fiction is my home rather than something else. Because I'm less interested in answering questions than asking them, and I'm more interested in exploring something without necessarily having to come to a black and white conclusion." He joined Roach to delve into what questions he raises in The Passenger Seat and the threads of reality that shape his fiction. Mattea Roach: Your novel partly draws on these real events that happened in 2019 in British Columbia, where there were these two young men that committed this series of violent crimes that sparked a nationwide manhunt across essentially the northern reaches of this country. It was a huge story for us here and made headlines around the world. When did you first hear about it? Vijay Khurana: I think that I actually first heard about it, or at least it probably sort of entered my consciousness a little while after those events had sort of taken place. A few months later. I had the similar reactions to probably what a lot of people had — just sort of a sense of shock, but also a sense of sort of unsurprise as well, because it was sort of the latest in what is a long series of especially young men committing acts of violence. But for me, it also really kind of touched me in a very specific way because I had been writing a lot of short stories about male friendship and the way that young men kind of move through the world and perform their masculinity and things like that. So it really struck a note with me for those reasons as well. What was your engagement with writing about male friendship and masculinity? What was it about that kind of bond that you felt was rich territory for fiction? As a fiction writer, a lot of what I'm interested in is just something that I don't understand, sort of trying to use fiction to explore things that don't quite seem to make sense to me in the world. I would definitely not call myself a political writer or a writer who's interested in engaging in political issues. Of course, male violence is is a political issue. But for me, I was trying to get to the bottom of some aspects of masculinity that I saw around me and even that I saw in myself and that I remembered from being a young man, years earlier. What similarities might there be between those sorts of "terrible men" and the rest of us, essentially normal, if flawed men? - Vijay Khurana Especially these ideas of the performance of masculinity, the way men see themselves reflected in other men and the ways in which game playing can come into the way men treat other people. In terms of psychological games and power dynamics. I had this fundamental question, which was, I wonder if there's a way to use fiction to — not answer the question — but just to explore this question of what kinds of people would be capable of doing something like those two teenagers did. But then also a much more troubling and difficult question: what similarities might there be between those sorts of "terrible men" and the rest of us, essentially normal, if flawed men? I want to talk about the two characters specifically, these two teenagers, Adam and Teddy. It's the summer before their final year of high school. They're taking off on this unplanned road trip. They are similar and yet different in so many ways. How did you develop these two guys in parallel? I started out with the desire to portray a friendship first and foremost, more than two individuals, and I thought a lot about my own friendships at that age. I thought about the ways in which sometimes, especially as a younger person, you can be thrown together with someone who isn't at all like you, but there can still often be quite an intensity to your relationship. I started out with the desire to portray a friendship first and foremost, more than two individuals, and I thought a lot about my own friendships at that age. I wanted to, from the very beginning, I really wanted to play around with the idea of the passenger seat versus the driver's seat. So asking myself always, who's in control and who's along for the ride, who's being passive and who's being dominant. I think that Adam is, certainly on the face of it, the more dominant one. He has a clearer sense of his own masculinity, even though it's quite a dark sense because he reads these books that are aimed at influencing young men and he spends time in various corners of the Internet. And then Teddy is much more passive. He is unclear about what he wants from his own manhood or adulthood, and on the face of it at least, he seems to be the one who's more along for the ride. What is the draw for Teddy as this guy who, in many ways, seems like he's more set up for success. What is the appeal of Adam for Teddy? Why do they end up drawn together in this way? Yeah, Teddy is a handsome kid whose parents are well off enough. He's by all indications a fine student, but I think that one thing he gets from Adam is almost a reason or an excuse not to sort of firmly cross the line into manhood or adulthood. Because I think he's quite afraid of that. He's afraid of what his relationship with his girlfriend might mean if he began to take it seriously. It gives him an excuse to reject the kind of manhood that he feels is maybe being offered to him. - Vijay Khurana And he's afraid of where he might be in five or ten years. I think that, for him, being friends with Adam, who quite firmly rejects a lot of what you might call traditional ideas about what a young man might do after high school, it gives him an excuse to reject the kind of manhood that he feels is maybe being offered to him.
CBC
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Pete Crighton dishes on music, sex and finding his soundtrack to queer joy
Social Sharing Growing up in the midst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic left Pete Crighton with a huge fear of sex — and he threw himself into music as a way to cope with those anxieties. "Even before I was struggling to make sense of my queerness, music just was another world for me," said Crighton on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "It was just a play-land where I didn't have to worry about my peers. I didn't have to worry about what I said or looked like or acted like." It wasn't until his 40s that Crighton knew he needed to face his fears and figure out how to live his queer life to the fullest. In his memoir The Vinyl Diaries, he takes readers on this journey — pairing big moments with the music that shaped them. On Bookends, Crighton tells Roach about his later-in-life exploration of sex and why music was so formative to his queer experience. Mattea Roach: This memoir is structured in a way where you're tying events in your life, relationships that you're in, to the music that you were listening to at the time. When did you realize that this nonlinear structure of association was the way that you wanted to write about your life? Pete Crighton: It's a great question. I don't know that I really consciously thought about it and it really just happened organically. It's the way I move through the world. All my markers are through what records I've bought, what records I've listened to and how I remember my life is really through those moments. All my markers are through what records I've bought, what records I've listened to and how I remember my life is really through those moments. - Pete Crighton I kept really detailed journals and when I would go back and look at things that I wanted to write about, I would actually have written down like, we listened to this record. This song was the one that Preston really liked. So I had this record of these things. When I would think of something I wanted to write about, it would just be in this journal, all of these associations from different points in my life because of those record albums and those songs. You were in this long-term relationship through your entire 30s. In your memoir, you write about how it was a little bit stifling for you that a lot of your creative impulses and interests didn't have space to breathe in that relationship. Can you tell me a bit about how you realized that that was not working? With all due respect to the person in question, it was all about me. It wasn't about him, but it was a slow build for sure. I was really, really terrified of HIV and AIDS when I was a youngster. So just the idea of being married, for lack of a better word, in a very heteronormative kind of way, was my salvation. To me, that's how I'm going to survive. That's how I'm going to thrive. I didn't really get to date a lot of people. I didn't get a lot of connections with other people. So I didn't really know what worked for me and what would bounce. I was with this person for over 10 years and it probably wasn't a great match for either one of us, to be perfectly frank. But one of the things I point to in the book is that he hated my record collection. That should have been a sign right from the start that maybe we weren't compatible because it's such an important part of my life. I think it's just those things that build up over time. There was no real thing that I could point to to be like, this was the day that it became untenable for me. You talk about marriage and monogamy as this kind of salvation, was the word that you used. Can you talk more about that? Why did it feel so central that you'd be willing to sacrifice some of your major interests and freedom and creativity in order to access monogamy? I was just so terrified of sex because of the HIV/AIDS crisis. I was 16 years old when Rock Hudson died and that was this big moment in the mass culture's understanding of what HIV and AIDS was and it just shut me down from truly wanting to explore my queerness and particularly my sexuality. So it wasn't so much marriage that I was after, but that idea of a monogamous relationship where we knew no one else was having sex with anyone else. And that felt safe to me. That felt like a protection from the thing that I was most afraid of, which was HIV and AIDS through sexual contact. What's really fascinating about this book is you tell this story about getting to explore hook up culture in your 40s, which is a story that I've heard about from talking to guys your age who've had that experience, but not a story that I'd read about in a book before. Why did you want to dig into that part of your journey? In fairness, to see it. I hadn't read this story and I grew up thinking your mid 40s is sort of like you're done, like that's the end of your life and you might retire and then you might play some golf or something like that. And I had never really read about this midlife excellence or excitement. So that was a real part of it for me was like, "Let's just be honest about what this journey is." For so long I wasn't honest about my own desires and my own sexuality that it just felt like laying it out really openly felt like the right choice to do as an artist and a writer.
CBC
20-05-2025
- Health
- CBC
Weightlifting made Casey Johnston stronger — in muscle and mind
Social Sharing After years of following diets and running a bunch of half-marathons, journalist and editor Casey Johnston finally hit her goal weight of 138 pounds at age 26. But after all that, she didn't find the happiness or self-confidence she was promised. Instead, she felt deeply hopeless, running on empty. "I realized I was hoping for this moment when everything would feel like it clicked and I would not have to be trying so hard," she said on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "[Where] it didn't take so much effort and so much of my mental energy and physical energy in order to just be comfortable in my body." "But I found that the longer it went on, the more kind of maintenance it seemed to take, the more the more energy and the more attention." That's when she remembered a Reddit post about weightlifting — and decided to try it — despite everything telling her that it wouldn't get her where she wanted to go. Now, years later, she writes about the unexpected healing she gained from weight training in her book A Physical Education. She joined Roach to discuss her journey to finding joy and acceptance in her body and, at the same time, her spirit. Mattea Roach: Where did the priority of optimizing your body come from for you, do you think? Casey Johnston: I tried to take a really honest inventory over the course of writing this book of how my thoughts have been shaped over and my view of myself and working out and food over the course of my life. I mean, there's cultural forces. There's the stuff we read in magazines. The ubiquitous presence of celebrity doctors who present themselves as having all of these quick, easy answers. There were, at the time, women's magazines that had so much to say about the best fruits for weight loss etcetera, but then there was also my own family background. My father was an alcoholic. We all struggled with that. My mother had her own traumatic background and it really created this dynamic of, when I was a child, that I always had to be on my toes. It was very performance-oriented in a way that I felt like I had to maximize my own performance to make everything as okay, as safe as possible for myself. That's not something that kids should have to go through, but it sort of permeated outward into how I saw my place in the world, which was that my role, my job as a person was to be responsive to all of these instructions that I was getting, that I had to produce my own safety and my own place in the world through this hard work of of following all these instructions that people were giving in order for acceptance. So you're in this spot where running, cardio, dieting is not working for you. You come across this Reddit post that clearly made an impact on you about a woman with a different approach to fitness: weightlifting. What sorts of things did she reveal to you about dieting and strength? What spoke to you in her story? When I saw this post I was completely blown away by it because I had always been told that lifting weights will make you bulky, that if you just sort of want to lose weight, that lifting weights is sort of a bridge too far unless you want to be some mega-strength person. So I was fascinated when I came across this post. A lot of times when you see before and after photos, they're about the exaggerated transformation. I was used to seeing infomercials for weight loss products where people had really changed a lot. What was fascinating to me was actually that her body hadn't changed that much. It had changed in minor ways. And I liked the aesthetic changes, but I was like, I've been warned up and down how much lifting weights would do everything you didn't want. She was here doing all of these things that I had been told not to do and she was not only fine, but she was so happy and having a great time. But after looking at her pictures, I was like, she's not that different. And not only that — in her description of what she was doing, she was only working out three times a week. She was only doing five reps at a time of three movements for a few sets and then she was done. So that was taking her 30 minutes. She was eating way more than I was at that time. She was here doing all of these things that I had been told not to do and she was not only fine, but she was so happy and having a great time. Was there ever a point in your lifting journey where you felt concerned that you were pushing yourself just to push yourself like you had been in previous workout routines? What I keep coming back to is that there are so many mechanisms that are inherently about building yourself up, about protecting yourself, and building a relationship with yourself, which really was the most important part of it to me. There's this just atomic unit of lifting that I hadn't experienced in any other physical activity though, you could apply it, just no one does. But it was more built into lifting. You would do a rep or do a set and ask yourself, 'How did that feel?' What was my experience of that? Was the weight too heavy? Was it too light? How did my forearm feel? Do I feel like I'm feeling this in the right muscles? I was able to understand how I was feeling about so many other things in a way that I had never done before. - Casey Johnston And a lot of these questions you don't know the answer at first and that is okay, but you're encouraged in this practice of inquiry of yourself and experience of something and that, to me, was so significant because pursuant to my personal background and pursuant to how a lot of us, but women especially, are treated in cultures to discourage inquiry of your experience. To push down whatever it is that you're feeling because someone else's feelings are more important, because someone else has greater needs than you. And that's not to say that you are the most important person in any room, but that this is an experience of yourself that radiates outward. The experience of asking myself how I felt and lifting encouraged me to develop that practice more outside in the world and I was able to understand how I was feeling about so many other things in a way that I had never done before.
CBC
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Ocean Vuong finds beauty in a fast food shift
Long before he became a bestselling writer, Ocean Vuong sold rotisserie chickens at Boston Market. In his latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness, he explores the meaning that can be found in the daily grind of a fast food restaurant. The book follows a young addict named Hai as he unexpectedly becomes caretaker to an elderly woman and makes unlikely connections at the fast-food restaurant where he works. Ocean tells Mattea Roach about challenging the American Dream, how being raised by women shaped him and why this novel is his most self indulgent yet. If you enjoyed this conversation, check out these episodes:Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's triumphant return to fiction [ ]Teresa Wong: Illustrating her family's past — in all its ordinary and epic moments [ ]
