Bechdel was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. She is the daughter of Helen Augusta (née Fontana)[4] and Bruce Allen Bechdel. Her family was Roman Catholic. Her father was an army veteran who was stationed in West Germany. He was also a high school English teacher, working full-time and operating a funeral home part-time. Her mother was an actress and teacher. Both of her parents contributed to her career as a cartoonist.[5] She has two brothers, Bruce "Christian" Bechdel II and John Bechdel, a keyboard player who has worked with many bands including Fear Factory, Ministry, Prong and Killing Joke. Bechdel left high school a year early and earned her A.A. in 1979 from Bard College at Simon's Rock. She graduated with a degree in studio arts and art history in 1981 from Oberlin College.[5] After her father died in 1980, her mother sold the family house, in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, the small town where Bechdel grew up, and moved to Bellefonte, a less provincial small town near State College with her long-time partner Robert Fenichel.[6]
Bechdel moved to Manhattan during the summer of 1981 and applied to several art schools, but was rejected and worked in many office jobs in the publishing industry.[7]
She began Dykes to Watch Out For as a single drawing labeled "Marianne, dissatisfied with the morning brew: Dykes to Watch Out For, plate no. 27".[8] An acquaintance recommended she send her work to WomaNews, a feminist newspaper, which published her first work in its June 1983 issue.[7] Bechdel gradually moved from her early single-panel drawings to multi-paneled strips.[9]Dykes to Watch Out For began this process, developing into a series of posters and postcards, allowing for people to have a look into the urban lesbian community.[5] After a year, other outlets began running the strip.
In the first years, Dykes to Watch Out For consisted of unconnected strips without a regular cast or serialized storyline. However, its structure eventually evolved into a focus on following a set group of lesbian characters. In 1986, Firebrand Books published a collection of the strips to date.[9] In 1987, Bechdel introduced her regular characters, Mo and her friends, while living in St. Paul, Minnesota. Dykes to Watch Out For is the origin of the "Bechdel test", intended as a joke,[10] which has become a frequently used metric in cultural discussion of film. In 1988, she began a short-lived page-length strip about the staff of a queer newspaper, titled "Servants to the Cause", for The Advocate. Bechdel has also written and drawn autobiographical strips and has done illustrations for magazines and websites. The success of Dykes to Watch Out For allowed Bechdel to quit her day job in 1990 to work on the strip full-time.[7]
In November 2006, Bechdel was invited to sit on the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.[11][12] In 2012, Bechdel was a Mellon Residential Fellow for Arts and Practice at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center at the University of Chicago and co-taught "Lines of Transmission: Comics & Autobiography" with Professor Hillary Chute.[13] On April 6, 2017, Bechdel was appointed as Vermont's third Cartoonist Laureate.[14]
In 2014, she posted a comic strip based on her Fun Home! The Musical![15] After Donald Trump's election as U.S. president she posted three new episodes of Dykes to Watch Out For: "Pièce de Résistance,"[16] "Postcards From the Edge,"[17] and "Things Fall Apart."[18]
In 2006, Bechdel published Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, an autobiographical "tragicomic" chronicling her childhood and the years before and after her father's suicide. It follows the past and present phases of her relationship with her parents, principally her father, and depicts the hardships individuals face when coming out.[20]Fun Home has received more widespread mainstream attention than Bechdel's earlier work, with reviews in Entertainment Weekly, People and several features in The New York Times.[21]Fun Home spent two weeks on The New York Times Bestseller List for Hardcover Nonfiction.[22][23]
Time magazine named Alison Bechdel's Fun Home number one of its "10 Best Books of the Year." Lev Grossman and Richard LeCayo described Fun Home as "the unlikeliest literary success of 2006," and called it "a stunning memoir about a girl growing up in a small town with her cryptic, perfectionist dad and slowly realizing that a) she is gay and b) he is too… Bechdel's breathtakingly smart commentary duets with eloquent line drawings. Forget genre and sexual orientation: this is a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other."[31]
Fun Home was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award in the memoir/autobiography category.[32][33] It also won the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work.[34]Fun Home was also nominated for the Best Graphic Album award, and Bechdel was nominated for Best Writer/Artist.[35]
In 2014, the Republican-led South Carolina House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee considered cutting the College of Charleston's funding by $52,000 for selecting Fun Home. The addition of Fun Home to the summer reading list caused significant backlash from some conservative students who found the depiction of sexuality to be "immoral," and "pornographic" for "graphically showing lesbian acts."[36][37][38]
Fun Home premiered as a musical Off-Broadway at The Public Theater on September 30, 2013, and officially opened on October 22, 2013. The score was written by Jeanine Tesori and the book and lyrics were written by Lisa Kron.[39][40] Kron and Tesori made history as the first all-woman team to win a Tony Award for best score.[41] Originally scheduled to run through November 3, 2013, the run was extended multiple times and the musical closed on January 12, 2014. The Public Theater production was directed by Sam Gold. Sets and costumes were by David Zinn, lighting by Ben Stanton, sound by Kai Harada, projections by Jim Findlay and Jeff Sugg and choreography by Danny Mefford.[42] The musical played at Broadway's Circle in the Square Theatre, with previews from March 27, 2015, and an official opening on April 19, 2015, running to September 10, 2016. Sam Gold, who directed the Public Theater production, also directed the show on Broadway, leading the Off-Broadway production team. The Off-Broadway cast reprised their roles on Broadway, except for the actors playing John, Christian, and Medium Alison. The Broadway musical won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Performance by an Actor in Leading Role in a Musical, Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Direction of a Musical.[43]
On January 3, 2020, it was announced that Jake Gyllenhaal and his Nine Stories Productions banner secured the rights to adapt the musical version of Fun Home into a film. Sam Gold, who directed the Broadway production, is set to helm the film, in which Gyllenhaal will star as Bruce Bechdel.[44]
Bechdel suspended work on Dykes to Watch Out For in 2008 so that she could work on her second graphic memoir, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, which was released in May 2012.[45] It focuses on her relationship with her mother. Bechdel described its themes as "the self, subjectivity, desire, the nature of reality, that sort of thing,"[46] which is a paraphrase of a quote from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.
The story's dramatic action is multi-layered and divides into a number of narrative strands:
Bechdel's phone-conversations with her mother in the present.
Bechdel's memories of interactions with her mother throughout her life, beginning in childhood.
Bechdel's therapy sessions, whose primary content is composed of analysis of her relationship with her mother.
Bechdel's richly imagined, and diligently researched, historical portrayals of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, and author Virginia Woolf, spliced together with Bechdel's own therapeutic journey with text from the psychoanalytic writings of Alice Miller, along with the story of Bechdel's own reading-through and relating to the works of Sigmund Freud.
An excerpt of the book, entitled "Mirror", was included in the Best American Comics 2013, edited by Jeff Smith. This episode riffs heavily on psychoanalytic themes quoted explicitly from the work of psychoanalysts Alice Miller and Donald Winnicott.
The Secret to Superhuman Strength
Bechdel published another memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, in 2021. The book chronicles Bechdel's fascination with fitness, jumping from sport to sport and discovering that she gets in her own way.[47]
Personal life
Bechdel came out as a lesbian at age 19.[48] Her sexuality and gender non-conformity are a large part of the core message of her work, and she has said that "the secret subversive goal of my work is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings".[49] In February 2004, Bechdel married Amy Rubin, her girlfriend since 1992, in a civil ceremony in San Francisco. However, all same-sex marriage licenses given by the city at that time were subsequently voided by the California Supreme Court. Bechdel and Rubin separated in 2006.[50] She subsequently lived with her partner Holly Rae Taylor, a painter,[6] for seven and a half years before their marriage in July 2015.[51] She lives in Bolton, Vermont, in a house she bought in 1996, adding her own studio to work in.[6][52] Bechdel goes by she/her pronouns.[53]
Selected works
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (Houghton Mifflin, 2008, ISBN978-0618968800)
For her outstanding contributions to the comic art form, in 2016 ComicsAlliance listed Bechdel as one of twelve women cartoonists deserving of lifetime achievement recognition.[61]
^Killacky, John R. "Alison Bechdel: graphic alchemist." The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 19.5 (2012): 44+. Literature Resource Center. Web. March 8, 2016.
^ abChristopher Bonanos; Logan Hill; Jim Holt; et al. (December 18, 2006). "The Year in Books". New York. Archived from the original on December 13, 2006. Retrieved December 12, 2006.
^ abKennedy, Martha H. (2018). Drawn to purpose : American women illustrators and cartoonists. Hayden, Carla Diane, 1952-. Jackson, Mississippi: Library of Congress. pp. 182–183. ISBN978-1-4968-1592-7. OCLC993601764.
