Dyke Drama with Leslie Lange

“What is dyke drama? Any lesbian relationship that last longer than one night. No, wait…any lesbian relationship that lasts long enough to require communication. No…actually, you could blindfold two dykes and put them in separate soundproof booths in separate states and still, somehow, the vibe of drama would be sparked. It’s unstoppable.”–Michelle Sawyer, author of They Say She Tastes Like Honey

Dyke drama. We’ve all experienced it. Yet rarely do we go beyond a simple recognition of this inexplicable force in our lives. We accept it as an intrinsic facet of our lesbian lives, something we inherit, like granola and thirty-seven ways to spell wimmin. That is, until Leslie Lange, author of the irreverent and practical, Dyke Drama: Your Guide to Getting Out Alive came along. Leslie is an expert on the topic, a self-avowed dyke drama scholar, which is why I thought I’d put her drama skills to the test and conduct this interview at gunpoint, or actually, since she lives in California, with a gun to the phone receiver.

LL: Do you really have a gun?

Q: Yes, it’s a WWII musket.

LL: (audible shudder) Oh, is it clean?

Q: Well, between balancing work, a stilted personal life and corrupting family values, I don’t really have time… hey, who’s asking the questions here?!

First off, I want to say kudos to you for writing this book. If Showtime can create a whole series dedicated to dyke drama, and if it yields nearly 1 million hits on Google, it’s way past due for it to receive the respect and humorous anecdotes you bring to the topic. So thank you for that. And thank you also for not being a lesbian mystery writer. I was beginning to think all lesbians were secretly detectives.

LL: Actually, all detectives are secretly lesbians. Maybe it all started with Nancy Drew and her butch/femme friends George and Bess. I couldn’t get enough-I’d be reading The Secret in the Old Clock, and there’s this other “secret” inside myself at the same time. Who can’t relate?

Q: Why do you think, as you wrote in your preface, that “dyke drama is the single most important facet of lesbian culture ever”?

LL: As Sappho said in 400 BC, “Lesbos ergo drama.” We’re dykes, therefore there is drama. However, I do believe it is something lesbians may be reluctant to share outside of our own community-because it’s a stereotype that can be used against us, to discredit our relationships. Humor is a good place to start. Actually, maybe it would’ve been better to start with The L Word because then I’d be rich.

Q: Speaking of money, you write, “All forms of dyke drama are exacerbated by the underlying frustrations of being a second-class citizen times two: the isolation of the closet, the toll of self-hatred, and the social and economic disadvantages of being both a woman and gay.” Could you elaborate on how socio-economic status contributes to dyke drama?

LL: Maybe I can’t afford to go to a movie but I can turn my life into one. I think a lack of power leads to more manipulative types of behavior, especially when lesbians rely so heavily on cohabitation. In one of my past relationships, my partner had more money than I did and I stayed longer than I should’ve, because I didn’t want to, you know, get a job or anything.

Q: You write in the preface that you had some trouble gathering Qta for this book: “People I considered friends suddenly feigned illness. Some didn’t have to feign illness-they actually became ill. “Why do you think there was such resistance to the topic of dyke drama?

LL: Ultimately, nobody wanted to stir up trouble with their exes. People maybe felt they were betraying the community. Some felt it was threatening or too negative, especially the more tense subjects like stalking, which hasn’t generally been acknowledged.

Q: I definitely felt better about my stalking habits after reading your book. But that’s…not relevant. Tell me about what your writing process was like. How many people did you brawl with to get fodder for this book?

LL: I surveyed about 200 people, a few people I knew and also some lesbian authors published by Alyson books. The accounts were all over the map. I remember reading one survey and thinking, “Oh, my god, this is hilarious! Who is this woman?” Then I realized it was one of my exes and she was talking about me!

Q: Did that make it into the book?

LL: Oh yeah.

Q: In your “cast of characters” section, you do an amazing job of nailing almost every lesbian stereotype to Qte, even lesser known, but no less poignant, ones such as:

- The Foreign Objects Freak: She’s obsessed with putting all kinds of weird objects into your hoo-hoo during sex (bananas, wine bottles, her grandmother’s cane…). Pros: If that’s your thing… Cons: Could Qmage your thing. Often heard line: “Call 911!”

- The $14 Lesbian: She’ll make you pay for everything because she always claims she only has $14 in her checking account. This claim may or may not be true. Pros: You’ll always feel generous around her. Cons: Pretty soon you’ll only have $14 in your checking account. Often heard line: “There’s a three-Qy hold on my paycheck.”

I was curious which ones, if any, reminded you of yourself?

LL: Well, which ones are you?

Q: Er…The Competitor, the one who “scatters the tiles when she doesn’t win at Scrabble. “Also, I’m The Googler, which is how I got your information. Listen Leslie, if that’s even your name, do I have to remind you who’s holding the cards here? (Taps receiver with the gun in a gentle but confrontational manner)

LL: In my past, I was a Class Issues Lesbian. I would always Qte women who went to Ivy League schools and then make them feel guilty about everything. Also, I’m a Perpetual PMSer.

Q: Clearly this book is supposed to be funny and there is a ton of hilarious advice on things like, “How to Sabotage a Lesbian Wedding” and “How to break up with the MOST drama possible.” Sometimes I found myself cracking up even during the more serious parts, like “Emergency Intervention: when your interviewer, I mean, stalker has a gun.” Have you gotten any flack for making light out of the more serious subject matter, like substance abuse, battering, etc?

LL: No, but I wish I had. It would sell more books. If only Curve magazine would run an article titled: “Why We Love to Hate Leslie Lange.”

Q: Since we’re discussing serious matters, are you Anna Nicole Smith’s Baby Qddy?

LL: Yes. We used parthenogenesis back in the early nineties, and kept it in the freezer all these years. Why do you think the judge has been dragging his feet on those DNA tests? They’re worried about a lesbian population explosion.

Q: I knew it, you slut! After everything we’ve been through-the three emails and 1.5 phone conversations! I’ve seen your true colors Leslie, or should I say Les-LIE. Ahem, I want to talk about the lesbian urge to merge. You have some riotous and astute relationship credos (particularly “how demoralizing it is to constantly come home from Old Navy with the same pair of cargo pants as your lover”). Do you think the merge is partially because our networks are often homosocial as well as homosexual? If we were straight, would we be content to just fight over who has to make dinner?

LL: I definitely think it’s good to hang out with a mix of people and I’ve been guilty of not doing that. There was a time when my only friends were my exes, and it’s ridiculous how we stay in these little lesbian covens. If we were straight, we might have better bounQries. Sometimes, when I’m processing with my girlfriend, I think, life would be so much easier, if we only understood each other less.

Q: You talk a lot about processing, how it “gets you everywhere and nowhere at the same time.” And you rather brilliantly explain “lesbian bed death” as a possible result of too much processing. I loved your term “lesbian sexual rejuvenation phase” as an alternative to bed death and think it should be added to the lesbian lexicon (lezicon?). Do you have any advice for precocious readers on how to prevent over-processing, or at least how to tone it down?

LL: There is no escape. NO ESCAPE. But here are some tips.

1. Listen and resist the urge to bring up your side of things.
2. Go for a walk. Get off the couch, and out of the NEST. Keep the blood circulating.
3. EAT SOMETHING!!!!

Q: You describe “unfinished business illness, where a couple has been breaking up for the last seven years.” I think this is one of the big components of lesbian bed death nee “lesbian sexual rejuvenation phase” - that our emotional connections/proclivities supersede our willingness to tolerate unfulfilling relationships way longer than we should. Can you elaborate a little more on the UBI phenomenon and why you think it’s a prevalent part of dyke culture (and drama)?

LL: My own example of UBI: Every two weeks for about six months following our break-up, my ex wanted me to come fetch my stuff. She’d call and say, “I left a box of your stuff on the back porch. Could you please come a get it?” The last one was, like, three boxes of tampons and some leftover dog food.

Q: What are you working on now?

LL: A memoir (that may turn into a novel) of my experiences as a volunteer for the Red Cross during Hurricane Katrina. It’s going be funny, even though Katrina itself was not funny at all. The Red Cross didn’t have time to do background checks and the mix of people was fascinating-from conservative Christians to radical gays to people who’d just gotten out of jail-and we were all working together to try to help people. Also, I’m working on a couple of film projects with my girlfriend-one about dyke drama and the other one about dildos.

Q: Dildos? That’s right up my…alley. I’m also curious about a line in your bio, about your stint as a parade clown? Tell me it was as glorious as it sounds.

LL: I’m so glad you asked that. It was glorious. I was a poop-scooping parade clown, basically walking behind horses and shoveling their excrement into a wheelbarrow. I wore sad-face make-up and really hammed up the misery of the task. The crowd loved it. And I loved the crowd. Shoveling poop was one of the happiest times of my life. And writing about dyke drama is the equivalent of “picking up the poop” of lesbians.

Q: The fact that you have written dog haikus on your website leads me to believe that we’re soul mates. Don’t you agree?

LL: (Laughter) Well, I could agree with that but you’ll have to elaborate.

Q: You can scoop my poop…

For more information on Leslie Lange, visit her official web page, Langeworld. Her book, Dyke Drama: Your Guide to Getting Out Alive, is published by Alyson Books and available at all major book retailers (and some not so major).

Anna is a post-Creative Writing major and validation junky. In addition to Queerky, she also writes for dykediva.com, centerstagechicago.com and does film reviews for theaspectratio.net. She uses quotation marks unnecessarily and spends entirely too much time justifying the artistic merit of limericks. You can contact her at banannarama01@yahoo.com

Footfalls Beyond the Edge

It’s not as if Carol Anshaw is my idol. It’s not as if she’s my crush. It’s not even as if I’ve longed for years to meet her. She is, however one of several writers to whose work I connected instantly, whose novels I have read repeatedly, and whose turns of phrase have seemed to me particularly profound. Of course by particularly profound I mean reflective of my specific worldview. Isn’t that what reading is essentially about?

In theory a reader reads to stroll outside of her specific mental neighborhood, to allow the scenery there to change her. However, most often the lines that strike us, the paragraphs we underline, the passages that alter our lives, all resonate not because they are stunning in their novelty, but because they are somehow deeply familiar. And that familiarity can have unintended emotional consequences; it can cause a reader to feel unjustifiably connected to a writer.

Think for a moment about a one-night stand. I could meet a woman in a bar, take her home with me, and fuck her till morning. She might awake feeling connected to me on an intimate level completely unwarranted by the casual sexual encounter we shared. She might act possessive and insist upon making me eggs. Just as the language of interlocking bodies can be easily mistranslated, easily endowed with meaning more profound than it deserves; there’s something similarly powerful and misleading about the rush of familiarity and resulting unbalanced connection inherent in reading.

This is not to say that after absorbing Ms. Anshaw’s work I have determined that every time she uses the word “and” she is secretly asking for my hand in marriage. Rather, I am attempting to frankly admit to the internal discomfort that arises when a reader is given the opportunity to interview a writer to whom she feels sincerely connected but with whom that connection is entirely one-sided.

What follows is an exact transcription of both our external dialogue and my internal monologue. Although by this point I feel I know you well enough to trust you to differentiate between the two (after all, we’ve been together for two full paragraphs now-that’s like two years in Lesbian Time), I have helpfully italicized the rantings of my inner voice. Before we begin however, some brief background on Carol herself. She is after all the subject of this interview.

Born in Detroit and received her degree from Vermont College–author of the novels Aquamarine, Seven Moves, and my personal favorite, Lucky in the Corner–stories, “Hammam” and “Elvis Has Left the Building” included in Best American Short Stories of 1994 and 1998– a past fellow of the Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts–teaches in the MFA in Writing program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago–has won the Carl Sandburg and Society of Midland Authors awards for fiction-three times been a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.

Let’s turn our attention now to a Starbucks in Andersonville (a neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois), where Carol Anshaw and I sit together at a table by the window discussing, well, her while I think about, well, me.

So, these questions are all over the map; I’m obviously interested in your work itself, but I’m also interested in how you work.

CA - Oh, I see.

Why don’t we start with some process-oriented questions.

CA - Like do I use a pen or a quill. I do use a quill actually.

Crap, she’s funny. Well, of course, her books are funny. Does that mean I have to be funny?

You don’t really use a quill.

CA - I do, I use a quill. And then I put a wax stamp on everything I finish with my initial on it.

Okay, now that was really funny. Volley back. Say something about, I don’t know, Carrier Pigeons.

CA - and I only use velum, whatever the hell that is.

Or is that the wrong era? Maybe I should go esoteric-drop a reference to those kings who shaved their messengers’ heads and tattooed a message on their scalps and then waited for their hair to grow back and then sent them to a different kingdom and the other king shaved their heads and read the message and…did that even happen or was that a dream I once had after eating some bad shrimp?

CA -Then I bind my books in goatskin. So my office really smells.

Okay, no time for that-just go for the Carrier Pigeons.

So, you rent an office here?

I choked damn it!

CA -Yeah, I’ve always had an office.

You just write here?

CA -I just write here.

So what made you decide you wanted an office separate from -

CA - What made me decide was years ago I tried to write at home. I would wear my pajamas way too far into the day, get depressed in the winter…If I have an office to go to it’s like I have a little job? And my job is writing. The point is having a space where I only write. That space can be an office it can be a table at this coffee shop. Once I used a spare bedroom in a friend’s apartment. Sometimes it can just be a psychic space: you’re at your writing table and certain hours of the day you don’t pick up the phone, you don’t go online which has become a great sucking hole for writers, and you just write. I think you can build up habits. I’ve been writing a long time and I can tell you that almost everybody who was writing when I started out writing doesn’t write anymore. It’s very easy to stop. Other things intervene, people have a couple of kids or they get a real high-pressure job or they make a lot of money and they don’t write fiction anymore. So you have to write when you’re not inspired; it just becomes part of what you do. If I’m not writing I’m real irritable because it’s a very ingrained habit; it’s like coffee. If I don’t have my coffee in the morning I’m not that happy. If I don’t write I’m not that happy. But I think it’s not for everybody. People want to be writers but not all of them really want to write.

So, in terms of writing what does an average day look like for you?

Things are on track. I was worried there for a bit, got a little carried away with the Carrier Pigeons. Get it, carried, Carrier Pigeons? Christ, get off the pigeons already.

CA -There is none. I wish there were. If I have a writing day I think it takes me eight hours up there to maybe work three, you know? There’s all the, you know, making a cup of tea and getting my mail.

And you teach, and I read you reviewed books?

CA - I used to. I did for a really long time.

So, do you have issues balancing?

I’m starting every sentence with “So.” Why am I doing that?

CA - Sure, doesn’t everybody? I mean, Phillip Roth doesn’t. He works by himself, outside New York and he writes in a little house that’s behind his house and that’s all he does, he doesn’t have to teach or anything like that, so I don’t think he has balance issues. Alice Munroe lives up in Canada, in, not a reclusive way exactly, but she says that she writes every day for four hours or something. I’m always admiring of people who…they’ve really carved out that space, but for me, like everybody else, I have a lot of other things I have to be doing to be a human in the world and so…

Let’s move on to some questions about your work.

That was abrupt. Probably gave the woman whiplash.

In Lucky in the Corner - I recommended the book to a lot of people-

CA -That’s good.

Approval!

Yeah. A couple of women from Chicago read it and were thrown by how specifically you placed events. Like, this happened on the corner of Clark and Berwyn.

CA - Oh, they didn’t like it?

There goes the approval.

They got mired down trying to figure out exactly where events were occurring.

CA - If they didn’t live in Chicago they wouldn’t feel that way cause it would just be a set and a backdrop for them, you know what I mean?

So that detail was an intentional choice?

No, she wrote it by accident.

CA - Sure, I like to make a complete scene. How many people didn’t like it though? Like, 50?

Backpedal.

No, well, two women said the same thing, but they’re in a relationship, so maybe they just think the same way, like they’ve done the lesbian merge or something.

Threw in some lesbian lingo there to establish my street cred. Wurd.

CA - (Laughs)

Score!

CA - You know when you’re a writer you hardly ever hear that stuff. I went to a library luncheon and this old librarian came up to me, she said, “You know, I think your book is immoral.” Well, thanks for telling me that because most people wouldn’t say that.

How did you respond?

CA - Well, I can see where she might think that. Did you read Aquamarine? In the first part she thought that Jessie having an affair with that UPS guy while she was pregnant was immoral.

So, let me ask you a question about that book actually.

Now that’s a transition.

Aquamarine came out in 1992. Do you still remember what the initial kernel of inspiration was?

CA - Yes I do. Two things. One, sometimes I’ll be out and I’ll see somebody my age and they’re very different and I think wow, you know, they could be me if I had made different choices. So that’s one impulse. The other impulse was to write about somebody who had their big moment early on and then everything was kind of a long soft downhill slide from there. I merged those. I had to have somebody who had something important happen to them at around 17, 18. You know a lot of the choices we make that we’re stuck with the rest of our lives are made when we’re really least capable of making good decisions. So she had to be a piano prodigy or a sports star of some kind, and I’d been a swimmer so I used swimming. I love that book. I loved writing it. It was pure pleasure to write, it was so much fun. I always like when people like it, it’s an old friend.

And then Seven Moves, which came out around 1996, was essentially about a woman whose partner disappears and she then realizes that the partner was, if not leading a double life, at least keeping a lot of important information from the protagonist. I know that as a reader one is not meant to focus on whether or not the author is writing from experience, but that book was so vivid and so sort of fraught with complex emotions…

“Fraught with complex emotions?”

…that I wondered if, within the fictional framework of the novel…

Did you have a girlfriend who fucked you over and then vanished?

…some minor aspects might have been drawn from life?

CA - Well, I have a teacher, someone I show everything to, she said I should write more into emotions, not glide over the surface, that I was extremely facile but didn’t really get down to painful stuff, so I had known of a situation like this that had happened when I was in my twenties. I worked with a woman and she disappeared and the husband was clueless, hired a detective.

Damn.

CA - You know, she left a pot of soup on the stove, she was making a quilt and she was mid-stitch…ultimately she turned up in the lake. It was during that time before he found out — it was months — you would have a ton of emotions but wouldn’t know which you had a right to. You might be angry, but you can’t be angry because what if she got bopped on the head by somebody, you know? It would just be an enormously traumatic time; it would be interesting to write about it.

How did you know when you’d mined the emotions enough?

CA - Well, it kind of had a time trajectory. And I like leaving a few–and I do this in all three books– leave a few footfalls out beyond the edge of the book.

Are there any specific themes that you’ve noticed in your work over time and do they change? Are there particular things that tend to inspire you?

CA - I like to think about how people go off the rails because of some out-of-left-field attraction, so that’s kind of a recurring theme. I’m also interested in sibling relationships. I have a lot of brothers in my work and I loved my brother very, very much and even in this new book he will be there.

Yes, you have a new book.

CA - I am just finishing my novel, Afternoon on the Milky Way. I think I’ve been working on it about 4 years.

So, keeping track of what happens on the inside of the book…

You mean plot! Say plot!

Rather, when it comes to plot, do you map things out in advance or just write?

CA - Yeah. With this one I did. But I don’t know everything that’s going to happen in the middle and I still don’t know all of everything that’s going to happen at the end.

Can one write without mapping?

CA - I don’t think it’s possible to write a really big book…they say Beethoven wrote all these symphonies in his head and he couldn’t hear them, anything’s possible I suppose, but for me I would get lost. I have to know what age somebody is and where their house is in relation– although according to your friends in the lesbian merge they don’t wanna know where anything is, they want that French anti-novel that takes place in a total void or whatever.

So, speaking of lesbians...

Fuck it. Clearly I have no ability to transition whatsoever. Good thing I was born a woman. Har har. Just some queer humor there.

Is being categorized as a Lesbian or Queer Author negative or positive?

CA - Aw, it’s both. I mean, I really really value my queer readers and I like to think I’m doing something for that body of literature.

You totally are.

Kissup.

CA - I feel like that’s a part of what I’m trying to do. From another direction, I’ll be happy when the world of literature is big enough to accommodate novels with straight and gay characters the way it does American and Chinese characters and you know, you don’t have to say “Lesbian Writer” like I’m having sex while I’ve got one hand on the lap top, you know? You wouldn’t say “Straight Writer.” You know, “Lorrie Moore, Heterosexual Writer.” I guess that’s what I would say about all that. Did you buy this little thing just for this interview?

The tape recorder?

CA - (Nods.)

Yeah…?

No I -

CA - You had it?

Yeah.

Think fast. No, think fast. The other fast!

It’s good for bootlegging Indigo Girls concerts.

I bought it to impress Jodi Foster.

CA - Oh, great. Yeah you know, I write with a quill and then I have a big reel-to-reel tape deck I have to bring if I want to record a concert. It’s really hard to get in under my coat.

Again with the funny! I’ve got nothing. When all else fails:

So…

And there it is.

I want to get back to questions involving process.

Right now, not earlier when it would have been logical to do so.

Are there specific things like exercises or emergency plans you use when you’re stuck writing?

CA - No, I never have any trouble because see, if I have a day where I’m not feeling like going further I can always go back. I’m an incessant polisher and adder to and taker away from and all that so I can do that for days and it still feels like some progress to me.

God, she’s this real writer. What the hell am I?

Do you ever get scared when you haven’t written for a while, like you think, what if I never write again, or do you have a confidence that -

CA - No, because I’m always writing -

I’m going to stop here in a minute, because Carol is about to grant me a perfectly worded conclusion; a sentence that wraps up our interview, and perhaps even epitomizes the life of a writer. In life, people say ideal last things all the time, but scenes bleed into scenes, and words echo less profoundly than in fiction. In this case, we spoke for another half hour, and I remained more carefully attuned to my inner monologue than to the insights of the woman on whose words I profess to hang. There was no final phrase, no ideal summation of all that we had discussed. After a while I got up to throw my cup away, and a homeless man approached Carol to beg for change. We’ll leave all that aside though; we’ll let Carol have the last word. And if you relate to that choice, if it resonates, makes you feel like I’ve read the words emblazoned on your soul as easily as picking out sentences on the back of a cereal box, I can accept that, it’s the nature of the beast. Just please don’t try to make me eggs in the morning.

CA - I’m always writing. I write as I go to sleep at night; I’m always adding to my book, I’m always living my life and living my book too.

Written by Sarah T Rosenblum

After living in Los Angeles for the last four years, Sarah T Rosenblum left to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is now very cold and also she misses Lindsay Lohan. Incidentally, Sarah actually does believe that every time Carol Anshaw says the word “and” she is secretly asking for her hand in marriage. Shh. Don’t tell Carol.

Watching Out for Alison Bechdel

Since 1983, cartoonist Alison Bechdel has been a political activist, social commentator and humorist, all wrapped up in the form of her well-respected and widely published cartoon, Dykes To Watch Out For. It goes without saying that every artist will show a little bit about themselves in their work; following that theory, after writing hundreds of columns about the lives and loves of dykes, trans-folk and occasional het character, one would assume that the celebrated queer cartoonist’s essence would shine through. Not entirely; but that is about to change.

With the release of her candid new book, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Bechdel has opened up a lifetime of her secrets for all to see. Not only is it written beautifully, the Vermont-based cartoonist has illustrated her story with gorgeously emotive visuals that frequently resemble intricate paintings more than they do cartoons.

Fun Home is short for ‘funeral home’, the family business that her father, Bruce Bechdel inherited. As the book’s full title implies, the work is both bitter and sweet, a journey that oscillates between Alison’s analytical perspective and her deep honesty. The novel primarily focuses on her dissection of two prominent elements in her life so far: firstly, her love of fine literature and secondly, Bechdel’s own coming out process. Tying those two threads together is Alison’s father, and much attention is placed on how such a complicated man played his own part in both her art and her queer journey. “I realized at some point in my process of writing this book,” recalls Bechdel, “that it was really about becoming an artist, and my apprenticeship as an artist under my father. It was a tough apprenticeship and he was very judgmental and extremely overbearing. He wanted me to be an artist…to do things he hadn’t done.”

While away at university, the young Bechdel bloomed emotionally and creatively, eventually coming out to herself and her family. After outing herself to her parents, Alison’s mother reacted with her own family’s hidden truths. Mother Bechdel outed her husband, explaining to Alison that her own father - a local grade school English teacher — had a long history of sexual relations with men and teenaged boys. In telling these stories, Bechdel’s novel is no upbeat, dumbed-down cartoon…in fact, just the opposite. Fun Home is an in-depth analysis of a family - and their breaking points — from the inside. “To boil it down to its crudest level, I think I wanted to show the anecdotal effects of homophobia in one family’s life. It is much more than that, I hope, but I guess that was sort of my mission.”

One day while at school, Bechdel received a phone call telling her that her father had been killed after being hit by a truck, an accident that to this day Bechdel believes was a suicide. Following years of counseling and consideration, Alison made the decision to write and draw her very private family’s story. She didn’t tell her mother that she was writing it until the project was a full year into its seven-year gestation. “I was very nervous about it; she’s a private person and her friends don’t know this stuff. Over the years, I had gotten a lot of information from her and I guess she felt kind of betrayed by me going public with it. I felt bad about that but I felt that it was something that I needed to do. At the same time,” recalls Bechdel, “she gave me a box of letters from my father, and I got a lot of insight into my father from those. One of the strangest moments ever was reading my father’s love letters to my mother.”

Those letters and the couple’s earliest development - a courtship that included quotations of F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Shakespeare - was the formation of a bond that was intellectually stimulating, if not romantically so. Growing up under the tutelage of such literarily-fueled parents provided Bechdel with the opportunity to access great literature and language, yet she admits that her desire to rebel against her parents led her to the land of comic strips. “My parents had passionate, creative interests; I carefully chose my own mode of expression so that I could elude their radar. In a way I became a cartoonist by default. It was one mode of expression that they didn’t know anything about, didn’t care about, and I could work without their scrutiny. Consequently, you don’t get taken seriously. I didn’t mind…I liked that…it enabled me to be free.”

Ironically, one of the reasons that Bechdel’s Fun Home book stands out as unique is the juxtaposition of the perceived simplistic cartoon form against her own broad use of complex language. Throughout the novel, Alison uses heady comparisons of her life to classic literature, from James Joyce’s Ulysses to Homer’s Odyssey. Truth is, the autobiography is often so intellectually complex that it occasionally risks alienating its audience. At one point of our conversation, I quote a line from the book back to Bechdel: ‘My father’s life was a solipsistic circle of self, from autodidact to autocrat to autocide’ and then ask her if her frequent use of symbolism and elevated language is possibly the result of her trying to ‘raise the bar’ of cartoons — consciously or unconsciously — in hopes of gaining her late father’s approval, or perhaps her own. “That’s a very good question. I won’t deny that that is a possibility, but I really do passionately care about words…they are extremely important to me. The thing about cartoon is that you’re using language and images…that is a potent mixture. That is something that really interests me, that interplay between language and reality, and how language can’t - no matter how precise you are - quite capture reality in the same way that an image can. Besides,” she defends, “there’s no point in dumbing it down. I feel like everyone can go to the dictionary, and I think they should. We have richer lives when we have richer language.”

One of the reasons that Fun Home took so long to complete was Bechdel’s painstaking process of capturing as much literal and expressive detail as possible in every frame. Her secret technique? Photography. “I took tens of thousands of photographs,” explains Bechdel, “dressing up and reenacting each scene to come up with each image. One very intense part of my photographic research was going back to the spot where my father was killed, standing there on the side of the road and taking pictures of trucks as they whooshed past. Even though I was acting things out matter-of-factly, the experience entered into my body in some way. I was in a jacket and tie at one point impersonating my father in a casket. I could either emotionally explore that or shutdown…I feel like I did both of those things.”

As a result of her groundbreaking work, advance copies of the book have received rave reviews from a wide variety of respected writers and cartoonists. Oprah-heralded author Dorothy Allison (Bastard Out of Carolina) called this book ‘brave and forthright and insightful’, while American Splendor comic legend Harvey Pekar dubbed Bechdel as “one of the best” in the cartoon genre. “My work does span the comic world and literary world,” explains Bechdel. “I’ve been getting feedback from writers that is thrilling to me!”

Throughout the writing of the book, Bechdel kept one foot in the Dykes To Watch Out For world, both out of enjoyment and economic necessity. “I could have done the book in half the time, but I had to keep doing my comic strip; I’d have two weeks to do my book, two weeks to do my comic.” After years of working on the strip, she admits “I started to yearn for more recognition and I hope that this book will get me some of that. I love my comic strip and I don’t want to demean it…I just feel like this book has a different quality to it.” Bechdel’s future plans include touring and promoting Fun Home and hopefully - if the reception to the book is positive - continuing to work on further autobiographical work. She admits to still being fueled by Dykes, although the cartoonist admits that her dedication has a personal cost of its own. “It is really getting to be a ‘can I afford to keep doing this?’ situation; I get $30 - $60 a paper, sliding scale. I couldn’t possibly live on my comic book income.” In an effort to keep the characters in print, she is currently working towards a cyber-answer to aid her financial problems. “I have a plan of Dykes To Watch Out For premium,” she explains. “You could get the strips emailed to you right off the drawing board, right when they are most current and have a connection to the current news. And I would leave them uncensored, or I could have occasional frontal nudity…it could be like HBO!” she laughs. After 23 years of working on that project, when asked if moving on from Dykes is an option, the ever-activistic Bechdel explains where her fuel comes from. “The strip is still really exciting to me. Especially at this point in history, as it is dissolving into totalitarianism, it is just vital to me to have an outlet.”

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is available from Houghton Mifflin Books.

Written by Denise Sheppard

Denise Sheppard (scribeatshawdotca) is a self-employed journalist/editor who likes long walks, candlelit dinners and writing for U.S and Canadian national mags and websites. Her fave topics are human rights-related pieces and entertainment journalism.