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Alison Bechdel rose to fame as the creator of the long-running alt-weekly comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” then jumped to an even wider audience by way of her celebrated graphic memoirs “Fun Home” and “Are You My Mother?” Her new book, “Spent,” is a graphic novel — but it was originally meant to be another memoir, as Bechdel tells Gilbert Cruz on this week’s podcast.
“Over the years that I turned myself from being a comic strip writer into a memoirist, I got very sort of self-righteous about memoir as a genre,” Bechdel says. “I just thought, why would you bother making anything up? Life is incredible. It’s all right there. It’s served up on a platter every day. Write about that. My friends who are fiction writers would say, You’re able to tell a deeper kind of truth with fiction, don’t you think? And I would agree with them, but secretly I would think, no, you can’t. You’ve got to tell the actual truth. But that does get really tiresome. It gets tiring. Anyway, after a while, I started to see the merits of fiction — there’s stuff you can do that you can’t when you’re trying to stick to absolute fact. So this was just a very fun, liberatory exercise. Honestly, I feel a little confused myself about what’s true and what’s not true in the book.”
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The post Alison Bechdel Is Finally at Peace Mixing Fiction and Memoir appeared first on New York Times.
