Since 1983 Alison Bechdel has been chronicling the lives of a fictional bunch of characters in her comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For. For the past seven years she has also been documenting her own life in the form a graphic novel. Fun Home, which comes out on June 8th, is intensely beautiful, sometimes disturbing and consistently astounding and comical.
The title refers to the Bechdel abode and family business, a funeral home. The book traces Bechdel's roots, from childhood to her eventual coming-out. It also explores her father's closeted homosexuality and his tragic death, which was inconclusively suicidal or accidental. Details of her life and those of her father, mother and brothers are embalmed and put on display.
“It was a relief to go back to the comics and get my head out of my own ass, because there's only so long you can obsess about your own childhood,” the author says of completing the book. At first she spent half of each month working on her comic strip and half on her book. But the book gradually started taking over her life until she finished it this past winter.
Finishing is no small feat for someone who confesses she could continue inking in details forever. Bechdel describes her creative process as a “barely harnessed obsessive compulsive disorder,” it could easily keep her from completing anything but she manages to control it just enough to be productive.
The specifics of that process are fascinating in their own right. Bechdel literally acts out each scene that she draws, complete with props and costumes, posing as each person in a frame and capturing it all in photographs. In a video clip available on her website she describes this routine from the studio of her Bolton, Vt., home of ten years as her cat ambles in one corner of the frame. “It indicates a weakness in my drawing technique,” she now says. “I can't make stuff up in writing or in drawing; I can only reproduce it.”
While Bechdel uses this method with Dykes to Watch Out For, it has a different impact when the subjects are her own family members, including herself. “With my family it has this weird other role, like I'm reliving my past, moment by moment.” For Fun Home Bechdel found herself reenacting difficult scenes in her life and “marinating in it.” A few years ago she actually visited the stretch of highway where her father was hit by a truck and took photographs of trucks rushing at her down the road.
She describes the creative fodder she relied on for Fun Home as the “detritus” of her childhood: drawings that go back to her seventh year, journals she began at age 10, an income/expense log she has kept since she was 13. She also dredged up maps of her hometown, grocery lists, sugar packets, and more ordinary mementos, such as photos, letters and ticket stubs. Her mother gave her a box of her father's letters, “several hundred pages of his thinking.” Bechdel transcribed them all and incorporates fragments in her book.
She is a meticulous researcher and says she became obsessed with finding good photo references, of the small Pennsylvania town she grew up in as well as other locations depicted in the book. With the help of Google Images she managed to find pictures taken from the rooftop of a Manhattan building featured in a scene where the family watches Independence Day fireworks.
As she made the book, Bechdel found that “the actual documentary truth was almost always richer and more surprising” than her memory of a particular event. She notes how she describes the summer of Watergate—when she got her first period, her father was almost arrested, her mother was performing in a play and working on her master's thesis, and a tree outside their house blew down in a storm.
“I have this distinct memory of all those things happening,” she says, “but I had no idea they happened in a two-month time frame. They all converged in a synchronistic way.”
Page 1 / 2 - Next
