Bruce Bechdel was a closeted gay man, a high school English teacher, a small-town undertaker and a distant father; in 1980, he stepped in front of a Sunbeam Bread truck and was killed. More than two decades later, his daughter Alison spun her father's death and life, her childhood, and her discovery of her own homosexuality into Fun Home, a graphic memoir that has received massive acclaim. Fun Home is a tour de force. What could have been another melodramatic tale of suburban dysfunction is instead a gripping, uncannily smart exploration. Bechdel's control is masterful; not a moment in the slim book feels out of place. It is wryly funny and heartbreaking.

Bechdel has produced the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For for almost twenty-five years; that strip remains popular among indie comic fans, but little could've prepared its author for Fun Home's reception. The New York Times, Publisher's Weekly, Salon, New York magazine, and Entertainment Weekly all cited it on year-end best-of lists; Time went one step further and named it Book of the Year, an astonishing feat and a milestone for comics. From her home in Vermont, Bechdel spoke to Hooksexup about the book and the impact of its success on her life. — Peter Smith

So have people been pounding on your door since this incredible coup with Time magazine?
Isn't that crazy? I don't know. I mean, people are emailing me and saying that's cool, so that's some attention, but no big invitations have come in.

Did you expect this kind of response to your book?
No, I didn't expect it, but at the same time, if I'm perfectly honest, I've always believed that my work would reach a bigger audience. I know that sounds a little cocky. But I've gotten very bitter and jaded over the years when it didn't happen. So I am surprised, and I also feel a little vindicated. It's so thrilling when people refer to it just as a book, and not even a graphic novel. That's what's so great about the Time thing. It's a kind of situation that I'm very used to as a lesbian. I've just been living for the day when I got to be just a cartoonist and not a lesbian cartoonist.

It's an incredibly moving, thoughtful piece of work.
Well, I don't know. I think it's good, but at a certain point I have to wonder if people are just getting a little hysterical. I've gotten very used to feeling underrated in my career, and now I'm really worrying about the opposite.

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You've said that you changed some things based on your family's reactions and kept some others. Were there particular parts that your family objected to, or particular things that you revised?
Mostly they were small, particular things, like my mother didn't want me to use the name of an actual town, because it felt too close to home for her. And one of my brothers felt like I was — this isn't a small particular thing, this is a big general thing — he felt like I was too hard on my father. He wanted me to soften some things. Which I didn't do. I tried to convince him that I was really being pretty fair. He has a whole different experience of the family than I do.

But I think the sense of fairness is really apparent. Did you ever lose that balance and feel taken over by your anger or by your compassion?
You know how you forget pain? People have been asking that question, and I feel like I've been giving the wrong answer. I keep saying, "Oh, no, it wasn't that intense or difficult." But in fact, yeah, there were very painful moments during this process. And times when I really felt actual grief about my dad, and times when I got extremely angry at him, and just all kinds of intense emotional responses. For a while, early on, I would break out in hives — I forgot about this. The first time I sent finished drawings to my agent, which was very early in the process, I was so stressed out, I broke out all over in huge, disfiguring hives. And that happened again when I showed the book to my mom, for the first time.

What was it like for you to show your mom, besides the obvious anxiety?
Well, I run the risk of sounding really disingenuous when I say this, but I feel terrible for causing my mother as much pain as I've caused her with this book. But if I felt so terrible, why did I do it? I wouldn't do it differently. It's just a very uncomfortable fact I have to live with.

The book feels so compassionate to me to everybody involved.
I don't know if she sees it that way [laughs]. I don't think she can have any kind of normal perspective on it. My editor actually told me that most families of people who write family memoirs don't even read the books. It's a real violation, in a way. You get turned into a character without any input.

If I came from a more intact family, the irony is that I probably wouldn't have written such a revealing book, because I would be, I don't know. . . kinder.

You keep your siblings out of the picture for the most part, though they're clearly part of the scene. But I wondered about their feelings as well.
You know, I don't even really know. I haven't talked that much with my brothers about it. I don't think they're thrilled about it, that's all. From the book you can tell we're not the most intimate family.

Has anyone else come out of the woodwork that's featured or that witnessed the stuff in the book? Have you heard from people that you haven't been in touch with, like [your first girlfriend] Joan or [your sexually forthright family friends] the Gryglewiczes?
Joan is someone who I checked in with before hand, because I wanted to get her approval for all that stuff. I feel really bad about the Gryglewiczes. . . but I think it was a pretty fair representation! I did send them a copy of the galleys before the book came out and tried to soften the blow, but I think they're pretty pissed off. I'm living in real dread that one of these boys my dad was involved with is going to contact me. I'm not sure what I'd say. But that hasn't happened. I have heard from a surprising number of people from my hometown and my old high school. People I haven't heard from or thought of in thirty years, who it turns out were either gay too, or they suspected about my father, or they knew about my father. And that kind of blows me away.

I've seen you say in other interviews that you don't have much imagination. But your comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, is fiction.
Yeah, it is. But it doesn't feel like fiction to me. Partly because there's so much about current events, and I use my characters very much as vehicles for stuff that's going on. So in that way it feels a little like non-fiction.

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Are you reshaping stories you've already heard, or interactions you've had? Or do these characters speak to you?
I wish they would speak to me. It would make it a lot easier. I don't know, I just build it all up very painstakingly. I think it's becoming a little more fictional, the characters are becoming a little more like real characters. I'm just whining today because I have to write my next couple of episodes, and it's always so fuckin' hard. I think I just resist having to go into that world and be so subsumed in it, for however long it takes. I just don't want to leave the real world. And then of course when I get there I don't want to come back. The transition is the hard part.

You had mentioned that your relationship suffered from the writing of Fun Home. Do you have trouble balancing the work and your personal life?
Yeah, I basically don't have a personal life. I just fit it in around. I let my work spill over and take up all the space. I guess that's a problem.

How much time do you spend working?
It's hard to say, because I don't try to contain my work. I mean, I certainly have tried over the years to have set hours and control when I'm in my office, but I can't. I've given up. I feel like I spend eighteen hours a day working, but really, they're not all productive.

Do you live with someone?
I did live with my partner until last year. We broke up, and she moved out.

Was it strain from the book?
That was definitely a big part of it. But then the question is, why was I doing that? It goes much deeper. I still don't quite understand what the problem was. I keep thinking, maybe I just can't do this. Maybe I'll just be sort of a celibate person and just turn my whole life over to my work, like a monk.

Well, I hope you don't do that.
Yeah, then Hooksexup wouldn't want to interview me. I bet you don't interview celibate people.

Oh, they sometimes slip through. You're also working on a new memoir. Is it an immediate follow-up to Fun Home?
I guess so. It picks up in my young adulthood, soon after my father's death. It's an investigation of self and other, mostly about relationships.

As you work on this, do you feel daunted by the success of Fun Home? Does that raise the stakes for you?
Yeah, totally. I try not to think about it, but I really don't have another great story like that. That's a pretty good story, and I can't top it. So I decided I wouldn't even try. I guess I've sort of gotten used to this problem, just from doing creative work for so many years. Every time I do an episode of my comic strip I feel like I have to top what I did last time, so it's a kind of pressure I've learned to manage. And I hope it won't be too paralyzing. I guess I sort of almost assume the second book is just going to disappoint people, and there's nothing I can do about that, so I just get on with it.

Just how long are we all going to have to wait to get our grubby little hands on it?
I don't think it'll take me seven years — I certainly hope not. It's coming along pretty well, I've already got kind of a handle on it. Maybe two or three years. A lot of the seven years was just figuring out the production stuff and figuring out my writing methodology, so it's going to continue in the same vein, unless the publisher tells me it's a bad idea. Yeah, I think this book will go a lot more quickly.

Is it less emotionally loaded for you?
Not really. This book's kind of about my mother. But don't tell her that.  n°
 

To order Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, click here.

©2007 hooksexup.com and Peter Smith.