Alison Bechdel | |
|---|---|
 Bechdel at theBoston Book Festival in 2011 | |
| Born | (1960-09-10)September 10, 1960 (age 65) |
| Occupation |
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| Education | Simon's Rock College (AA) Oberlin College (BA) |
| Genre | Autobiography,social commentary |
| Literary movement | Underground |
| Notable works | Dykes to Watch Out For, Fun Home, Are You My Mother? |
| Spouse | |
| Website | |
| dykestowatchoutfor | |
Alison Bechdel (/ˈbɛkdəl/ ⓘBEK-dəl;[1] born September 10, 1960) is an Americancartoonist. Originally known for the long-runningcomic stripDykes to Watch Out For, she came to critical and commercial success in 2006 with hergraphicmemoirFun Home.Fun Home was subsequently adapted as amusical, which won aTony Award for Best Musical in 2015.[2] In 2012, she released her second graphic memoirAre You My Mother? She was a 2014 recipient of theMacArthur "Genius" Award.[3] She is also known for originating what would later be called theBechdel test.
Bechdel was born inLock Haven, Pennsylvania. She is the daughter of Helen Augusta (née Fontana)[4] and Bruce Allen Bechdel. Her family wasRoman Catholic. Her father was an army veteran who was stationed inWest 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 includingFear Factory,Ministry,Prong andKilling Joke. Bechdel left high school a year early and earned herA.A. in 1979 fromBard College at Simon's Rock. She graduated with a degree in studio arts and art history in 1981 fromOberlin 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 toManhattan during the summer of 1981 and applied to severalart schools, but was rejected and worked in many office jobs in thepublishing industry.[7]
She beganDykes 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 toWomaNews, 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 oflesbian 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 inSt. 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", forThe Advocate. Bechdel has also written and drawnautobiographical strips and has done illustrations for magazines and websites. The success ofDykes 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 theAmerican 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 theUniversity of Chicago and co-taught "Lines of Transmission: Comics & Autobiography" with ProfessorHillary 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 herFun Home! The Musical![15] AfterDonald Trump's election in 2016 as U.S. president she posted three new episodes ofDykes to Watch Out For: "Pièce de Résistance,"[16] "Postcards From the Edge,"[17] and "Things Fall Apart."[18]
Bechdel became Professor in the Practice, English and Film & Media Studies at Yale University in 2024.[19][20]
Bechdel resides inBolton, Vermont, and works with the Vermont-based alternative weeklySeven Days.[21]
In 2006, Bechdel publishedFun 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.[22]Fun Home has received more widespread mainstream attention than Bechdel's earlier work, with reviews inEntertainment Weekly,People and several features inThe New York Times.[23]Fun Home spent two weeks onThe New York Times Bestseller List for Hardcover Nonfiction.[24][25]
Fun Home was hailed as one of the best books of 2006 by numerous sources, includingThe New York Times,[26]amazon.com,[27][28]The Times of London,[29]Publishers Weekly,[30]salon.com,[31]New York magazine,[32] andEntertainment Weekly.[32]
Time magazine named Alison Bechdel'sFun Home number one of its "10 Best Books of the Year."Lev Grossman and Richard LeCayo describedFun 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."[33]
Fun Home was a finalist for the 2006National Book Critics Circle Award in the memoir/autobiography category.[34][35] It also won the 2007Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work.[36]Fun Home was also nominated for the Best Graphic Album award, and Bechdel was nominated for Best Writer/Artist.[37]
In 2014, theRepublican-ledSouth Carolina House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee considered cutting theCollege of Charleston's funding by $52,000 for selectingFun Home. The addition ofFun 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."[38][39][40]
Fun Home premiered as a musical Off-Broadway atThe Public Theater on September 30, 2013, and officially opened on October 22, 2013. The score was written byJeanine Tesori and the book and lyrics were written byLisa Kron.[41][42] Kron and Tesori made history as the first all-woman team to win a Tony Award for best score.[43] 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.[44] 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 fiveTony 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.[45]
On January 3, 2020, it was announced thatJake Gyllenhaal and hisNine Stories Productions banner secured the rights to adapt the musical version ofFun 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.[46]
Bechdel suspended work onDykes 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.[47] 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,"[48] which is a paraphrase of a quote from Virginia Woolf'sTo the Lighthouse.
The story's dramatic action is multi-layered and divides into a number of narrative strands:
An excerpt of the book, entitled "Mirror", was included in theBest American Comics 2013, edited byJeff Smith. This episode riffs heavily on psychoanalytic themes quoted explicitly from the work of psychoanalysts Alice Miller and Donald Winnicott.
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.[49]
Bechdel's next graphic novel,Spent: A Comic Novel, was released by HarperCollins Publishers in May 2025. The novel features a cartoonist, also named Alison Bechdel, running a pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont while attempting to write a book about capitalism. The character is based on Bechdel but contains many fictionalized details, including the goat farm.[50]
Bechdelcame out as a lesbian at age 19.[51] 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".[52] In February 2004, Bechdel married Amy Rubin, her girlfriend since 1992, in a civil ceremony inSan Francisco. However, allsame-sex marriage licensesgiven by the city at that time were subsequently voided by theCalifornia Supreme Court. Bechdel and Rubin separated in 2006.[53] She subsequently lived with her partner Holly Rae Taylor, a painter,[6] for seven and a half years before their marriage in July 2015.[54] She lives inBolton, Vermont, in a house she bought in 1996, adding her own studio to work in.[6][55] Bechdel goes by she/her pronouns.[56]
For her outstanding contributions to the comic art form, in 2016ComicsAlliance listed Bechdel as one of twelve women cartoonists deserving of lifetime achievement recognition.[64]
Media from Commons
Quotations from Wikiquote
Data from Wikidata
