DEFYING MENDACITY

A Heteroclite Author Speaks

Her life story is a paean to her strength of character and her reverence for the sanctity of truth telling. As such, she takes pride in promulgating the most intricate details of her own personal truth, despite the inherent pain that lies therein. Her name is Alison Bechdel, cartoonist extraordinaire, and author of “Fun Home”, a graphic memoir with “tragicomic” dimensions. This autobiographical work was on the New York Times bestseller list for several weeks and was number one on Time Magazine’s best books of the year list for 2006. Bechdel is best known for her comic strip, “Dykes To Watch Out For” which first emerged on the literary fringe scene in 1983 in a feminist journal called Woman News. For 25 years, Bechdel has been churning out her strip on a daily or weekly basis, depending on her need for down time, and has published her entire collection of comics in 11 books of the same name.

On Wednesday evening, March 5th, at a presentation of her 2006 graphic memoir, “Fun Home”, Ms. Bechdel was introduced to the audience of over 400 at the Rutgers University Student Center by Hillary Chute. Ms. Chute is currently a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows and last year she earned a Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University with a dissertation titled “Contemporary Graphic Narratives: History, Aesthetics, Ethics.” Her interest in comics began when she read Art Spiegelman’s “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale” in a graduate class on contemporary fiction. She introduced Ms. Bechdel by reading an e-mail exchange that she had with her senior editors at The Village Voice concerning “Fun Home”.

Bechdel told the audience that she had been working on this book for seven years, yet in reality she has been working on it all her life. Having retained her early childhood diary entries, family photos and an iron clad memory, she set about to re-create the world that she grew up in on the pages of gray and green cartoon panels. Her first major cartoonist influence was the work of Charles Addams, whose gothic house was an eery reminder of her own, a place where, according to Bechdel, “things don’t appear what they seem”. The major focus of the book surrounds the complex relationship with her “cryptic, perfectionist dad”, Bruce Bechdel who died at the age of 44. It is not clear whether his untimely demise could be attributed to a tragic road accident or premeditated suicide. Bechdel says that her book is an “intricate structure, based on books that her father was obsessed with.” The works of Camus, Joyce, Ulysses, Colette and Proust are intertwined into the narrative and the literary allusion, the influence of literature on life, and the influence of life on the interpretation of literature play a prominent role in the text.

During a slide show presentation of pages from her book, Bechdel read a chapter entitled “The Artificer”, which speaks volumes about the underlying pathos of her father. Bruce Bechdel was employed as a high school English teacher and was the town’s (Beech Creek, PA) funeral home director (one meaning for the “fun home” of the title), and Bechdel notes that her father “appeared an ideal husband.” Aside from some epochally misguided escapades with local teenagers, Bechdel obsessively channeled his energies into the florid renovation of the family’s gothic revival house. ”He used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not,” Bechdel says. She continued, ”My father began to seem morally suspect to me long before I knew that he actually had a dark secret.” While earnestly contemplating how to come out to her parents as a lesbian while in her freshman year at Oberlin College, Bechdel learned that her father was engaging in sexual relations with underage teenage boys and even had a run-in with the law for serving alcohol to minors.

Bechdel also laments the fact that her father was at best emotionally distant and at worst verbally abusive. “My father treated his furniture like children and his children like furniture.” says Bechdel. “He was emotionally absent and while he was alive, I ached as if he were already gone.” She also spoke of the “fully developed self-loathing” of her father that manifested itself in the form of a man “obsessed with his appearance” while showing “no physical form of affection” to his children. What seems to have irked Bechdel the most was the subtle dishonesty, outright lies and appearances of “normalcy” that her father attempted to extol. Because of this Bechdel says she “developed a fetish for the truth, for detailed authenticity”. “Appearances are deceiving and I wanted to be upfront about being gay. I’ve always felt the tension between being an outsider and being accepted and I wanted everyone to know that I was a ‘big dyke’.” she says.

For Bechdel, becoming an artist and writer meant, “bridging symbol and reality. Images and words solved a problem of self-obliteration.” In the last segment of the evening Bechdel revealed the technical aspects of the creative process in the making of “Fun Home” by showing a most fascinating and informative slide show of the convergence of panels and words in her work and even a mini-video of herself drawing and painting the characters and scenes from her home drawing board.

The evening concluded with Ms. Bechdel autographing copies of “Fun Home” and “Dykes To Watch Out For” for her legions of loyal and devoted fans, and did so until “the cows came home” as she stated on her blog. Bechdel’s face appeared visibly worn as the evening wound down. Despite it all, she graciously greeted the seemingly endless line of admirers. While most writers on a book tour relish the notoriety, lavish attention, adulation and accolades bestowed upon them, it would appear that being the subject of such praise is a most daunting task for Bechdel. As she confided to one woman, “I’m really an introvert.”