The Comics of Alison Bechdel: From the Outside In

INTRODUCTION

Serializing the Self in the Space between Life and Art

JANINE UTELL

Alison Bechdel has described her work as inappropriately intimate. She suggested the phrase for the title of a 2018 exhibition spanning her entire career, and it captures the transgressive and sometimes playful nature of many of her comics, as well as the demands she places on her readers as they enter her world.¹ Bechdel has used comics to explore multiple versions of her most private selves. In her work, we are invited into a world where the messy feelings of difficult and deep relationships are sounded and where things that challenge our ideas of what should be represented are, in meticulous, sometimes graphic, detail. At the same time, entering into that world is itself challenging. Navigating the private histories of others, seeing the losses and traumas of others, bearing witness to their essential humanness: these are challenging acts artistically, narratively, and ethically, but they are what Bechdel calls on us to do.

Bechdel is preoccupied with intimate lives, including her own, and with making varieties of intimacy visible, in a variety of narrative forms. In the many interviews Bechdel has given about her life and her art, and in her own writing about her work, such as that collected in The Indelible Alison Bechdel: Confessions, Comix, and Miscellaneous Dykes to Watch Out For (1998), she offers herself up for scrutiny and continues to probe what drives her to represent her most private concerns.² Her major works—the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, and her two critically acclaimed memoirs, Fun Home (2006), which has also been adapted into a Tony Award–winning musical, in addition to receiving numerous accolades, and Are You My Mother? (2012)—bring us first into the lives of a lesbian community, and later into the lives, past and present, of Bechdel herself.

On first look, it might seem that the trajectory of her work has taken a swerve. Dykes to Watch Out For (DTWOF) ran from 1983 to 2008 and launched Bechdel’s career. The strip serializes the stories of a group of lesbian friends and lovers as they go through romantic entanglements and the arcs of long-term relationships, consider marriages and have children, struggle with careers and health crises: in short, live entirely ordinary lives with all the humor, pathos, and anxiety of any ordinary person. It is the very ordinariness of the intimate lives of DTWOF that makes it such a significant moment in comics. Bechdel, who has been out as a lesbian since 1980, committed herself to representing, to making visible, the lives of individuals in her community, even if sometimes she depicts that community as being more utopian than seems quite possible. In The Indelible Alison Bechdel, she writes of early DTWOF cartoons: The quality of the drawing and writing was wildly uneven—more often than not the cartoons weren’t even funny—but lesbians were so desperate to see a reflection of their lives that it didn’t seem to matter much (Indelible, 27). DTWOF speaks to the need of people in a subculture to see themselves reflected back to themselves, something Bechdel believes helps members of that subculture reach [their] potential (Critchfield and Pula, 400). Bechdel, along with other gay and lesbian comics artists from the 1970s through the 1990s like Mary Wings, Roberta Gregory, Howard Cruse, Diane DiMassa, and Jennifer Camper,³ created a space first in underground comix and then more widely in comics culture for previously invisible members of the community to be seen, and to see themselves.

DTWOF is concerned with community, and with the intimate relationships that form and develop within the networks and bonds of that community. It imagines, even idealizes, what it means to be out, to live openly and free from shame and prejudice. Fun Home, published in 2006, and Are You My Mother?, published in 2012, seem to turn from the outside in. Layer by layer, the two memoirs delve into Bechdel’s relationship with her parents, the first focusing on her father and the second on her mother, moving backward and forward in time. They cross the boundaries of multiple spaces as they move further inward toward deeper, more intimate parts of Bechdel’s many selves. Bechdel the artist deploys Alison Bechdel the narrator, who tells of Alison Bechdel the character, who herself changes as she traverses the spaces of home and therapist’s office, the interior spaces of psychic life and memory, the textual spaces of family photographs and books, all nesting (not always comfortably) within each other. All of Bechdel’s work, both the cartoons and the memoirs, should be read as concerned with relationality, with representing the intimate spaces of the self, and that self in intimate relationship with others. Whether she is drawing the dykes of DTWOF sitting around a kitchen table drinking wine and talking politics and lovers, or drawing herself sitting in her therapist’s office describing a dream, Bechdel makes visible the self out in the world alongside the inner world of the subject.

Bechdel’s Life and/as Art

Bechdel’s world started out rather small. She was born in 1960 and grew up in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, a place where, she says, the pressure to conform was savage (Indelible, 20). Bechdel began life in a rural setting, raised Roman Catholic by parents who were forced to move back to the United States from Europe, where her father, Bruce, had been stationed in the army, to take over the family funeral home—the fun home of the celebrated memoir. Bechdel and her two brothers grew up in a Victorian-style house that was the object of Bruce Bechdel’s obsessive attention. Bruce Bechdel, who worked as a high school English teacher in addition to being a part-time funeral director, lived as a closeted gay man. Helen Bechdel, Bechdel’s mother, acted in local theater and, according to the accounts in her daughter’s memoirs, was aware of her husband’s sexual orientation, including dalliances with underage young men. The tensions created in the family by the closet—shame, silence, fear of exposure and disclosure—profoundly influenced Bechdel’s work.

It was living with such tension, such shame, that led Bechdel to come out as a lesbian at the age of nineteen. Shortly thereafter, Helen Bechdel decided to divorce Bruce Bechdel, and subsequent to (perhaps as a result of) this series of events, he stepped in front of a truck as it barreled down a Pennsylvania highway not far from the family home. This is the catalyst for Fun Home. Was it the daughter’s act of coming out that led to the father’s suicide? Was there something in their relationship, some shared connection, that might have saved him? How had the daughter been able to choose a different path?

Dykes to Watch Out For: The Making of a Lesbian Cartoonist

In an interview with Terry Gross, the host of National Public Radio’s program Fresh Air, Bechdel says:

In many ways my life, my professional career has been a reaction to my father’s life, his life of secrecy. I threw myself into the gay community, into this life as a lesbian cartoonist, deciding I was going to be a professional lesbian. In a way, that was all my way of healing myself. (Lesbian Cartoonist)

Bechdel had been drawing since she was a child, but becoming a professional lesbian cartoonist did not happen immediately. After graduating from Oberlin College in 1981, Bechdel moved to New York and began applying to art schools; she was roundly rejected. Around this time, she started doodling dykes in letters to a friend. The oft-told story of the genesis of DTWOF is a sketch of Marianne, dissatisfied with the morning brew: Dykes to Watch Out For, Plate No. 27; Marianne is depicted nude, standing crane-like on one foot with a coffeepot in her hand, the grimace on her face haloed by frizzy hair.

Becoming a lesbian cartoonist was easy for Bechdel, she writes in The Indelible Alison Bechdel, insofar as others had paved the way. By the time she walked into the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore in Greenwich Village in the early 1980s, she writes, There was already such a thing as a lesbian cartoonist. I didn’t have to invent it, or fight for it, or suffer over it. I just did it (Indelible, 10). The challenge for Bechdel at the start was drawing women. Since childhood, drawing men had been a way for her to work through strategies of representing gender and sexuality and a means of practicing her craft, but she came to see it as neither personally nor professionally fulfilling. Early on, attempting to represent women had proved an obstacle, even as being out as a lesbian and becoming more committed to a highly politicized feminism led Bechdel to see the necessity of drawing women. She writes:

As I grew more and more politicized, it began to rankle that my sketchbooks were devoid of women…. To draw a woman involved not just a change of subject matter but rewiring the circuitry that seemed to run directly from my subconscious to my pen. (Indelible, 24)

We find here Bechdel’s ongoing concern with, and belief in, the power of representation, but we also find her struggle with finding and wielding that power in a heterosexist and misogynist society (including, possibly, some of the underground comix world, as might be seen in the work of figures like R. Crumb, influential as such figures have been for Bechdel herself).

For much of Bechdel’s early life, being a woman meant conforming to conventional stereotypes of femininity and experiencing shame attendant on the female body. It was not until Bechdel realized she could draw women as lesbians that it became possible to handle the female form, and thus possible to tell women’s stories through comics (Indelible, 26). A well-known scene in Fun Home depicts the young girl character Alison in a diner with her father; the two of them see a bull dyke walk in, a moment the Alison narrator describes in gutter text as unsettling. Bruce asks, "Is that what you want to look like? The Alison narrator reports in gutter text, What else could I say? and the Alison child character in the panel replies to her father, No" (FH, 117–19).⁴ This sequence becomes the powerfully moving scene Ring of Keys in the 2013 off-Broadway musical adaptation by Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron (moved to Broadway in 2015), and it speaks to the significance of representation and the force to be wielded by signifiers of transgressive gender performance. The ring of keys on the bull dyke’s belt is a small visual detail in the Fun Home panel, yet it gathers meaning and affective force in the theatrical adaptation, allowing for the transcending of the shame the girl Alison feels in that moment. Through its use of the portrait of the artist as a young person, or Künstlerroman, genre, Fun Home shows the origin of the circuitry that led to shame and discomfort with sexuality, and the work involved in rewiring. Both Fun Home and Are You My Mother?, moreover, elucidate the ways in which Bechdel, throughout her career, has imagined that direct line from her subconscious to her pen.

Finally, then, here was Marianne; Marianne was joined by Twyla, and Madeleine, and Bechdel’s friend receiving the doodles in the mail suggested the dykes be sent to the feminist periodical WomaNews, which Bechdel did in 1983. At first the cartoons were single panels with a bit of wry, dry wit. In 1984, Bechdel began producing Dykes to Watch Out For in serialized strip form, and in 1987 the central characters of Mo Testa and Lois were introduced. By this time, DTWOF was appearing in publications beyond WomaNews. Bechdel would go on to self-syndicate the comic strip nationwide and release eleven collections of DTWOF cartoons, with titles like Spawn of Dykes to Watch Out For, Unnatural Dykes to Watch Out For, and Hot Throbbing Dykes to Watch Out For, as well as assorted merchandise such as calendars and mouse pads. (These were in addition to the design work she was doing for gay and lesbian activist groups, creating posters, T-shirts, and the like.)

Until Bechdel ended the strip in 2008, with the occasional revival after the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States in 2016, DTWOF followed the lives of Mo, Bechdel’s alter ego; Mo’s lovers, first Harriet and then Sydney; Jezanna, the owner of the independent feminist bookstore Madwimmin Books, where Mo works until a Bounders Books and Muzak puts it out of business; Sparrow, a bisexual woman who winds up having a baby with the very progressive and mild-mannered Stuart; Clarice and Toni, long-term partners (until the arrival of Gloria) who have a little boy, Raffi, together; Ginger, a PhD candidate in English who often finds herself unlucky in love (including a long-distance relationship with Malika, whom Ginger meets at a lesbian conference in Atlanta); and the polyamorous genderqueer drag king Lois. The strip responds to current events, satirizes women’s studies programs and queer theory, pokes gentle fun at Pride and vegans, and in general gives a clear-eyed, generous, and often hilariously particular insight into a community of lesbians. One notable exception might be Real World, the strip Bechdel produced after 9/11. Entirely wordless, a sequence of eleven panels shows the responses of each of the main characters: reading the newspaper or watching television, meditating, holding each other. The prioritization of relationships and the deploying of private intimacy in the face of public trauma are clearly signaled.

DTWOF took for its material Bechdel’s own experiences living in such a community (though perhaps not as ideal in real life) in Minneapolis, where she moved from New York in the mid-1980s. The strip is also the source of the famous Bechdel test. In an early episode titled The Rule, which ran in 1985, two characters are trying to decide on a film to see. One character explains her rule: the film has to (1) have at least two women in it, (2) who talk to each other, (3) about something besides a man.⁵ The wide recognition of the Bechdel test, way beyond the readers and fans of DTWOF, is the result of greater cultural attention to women in media and reminds us that representation, visibility, and identity are central to DTWOF and Bechdel’s work.

DTWOF followed the contours of changing attitudes and ways of thinking about gender and sexuality over the course of its entire run, showing through meticulous and cleverly chosen detail, and a great diversity of characters, what these look like in lived experience. As Lois says in Au Courant, published in 1994, Love is a many-gendered thing (Essential, 125). At the center of it all is Mo, with her signature striped shirt and spiky hair, round glasses, neuroses, and righteous indignation. Often seen holding a newspaper and alienating people even when she doesn’t mean to, Mo judges her friends for looking at beautiful women in the midst of a protest against the First Gulf War (Dancing in the Streets, 1990; Essential, 63). The introduction of Sydney, a gender studies professor, affords the opportunity for much satirizing of academics, as well as for working through the political disillusionment that came with the first Bush administration in the 1990s; suddenly, Mo’s righteous indignation seems impotent. Sydney is a complex figure. Snarky and cynical, Sydney left another character, Thea, when she found out she had multiple sclerosis before her involvement with Mo; Sydney also cannot quite keep herself from creating erotic entanglements for herself over the internet. Yet one of the especially emotionally resonant story lines of the strip is Sydney’s diagnosis with, and treatment for, breast cancer, which unfolds in parallel with Clarice and Toni getting pregnant and giving birth to Raffi. Bechdel’s strip speaks directly, and intersectionally, to the collective experiences of contemporary women from the highly singular points of view of diverse individuals.

In this way, DTWOF approaches a kind of universality that Bechdel perhaps did not expect when she began the strip. Bechdel’s website, dykestowatchoutfor.com, still attracts thousands of visitors who comment on and celebrate the strip through its archives, even as updates on the blog have become more sporadic. On the occasion of the comic’s twentieth anniversary, in a 2003 interview with Teresa DeCrescenzo for Lesbian News, Bechdel said, I kind of half-seriously miss the days of being invisible. I wouldn’t really want to go back, but it has been hard for me to watch queer culture get systematically deracinated and assimilated and depoliticized over the past 10 years (25). And while early on the cartoonist did claim that getting some space in the Village Voice would be a professional achievement, she refused any move that would seem to be allowing the appropriation by, or pandering to, the tastes of the mainstream (Bechdel and Thomas, 14). When she was contacted by Universal Press for syndication in mainstream newspapers in 1994, on the condition that she produce a strip that was less political, Bechdel said no: I have less than no interest in speaking to the mainstream. I mean, if my works ever got banal enough to make it into a mainstream newspaper, I hope someone would just put me out of [my] misery (Rubenstein, 34). Nevertheless, as issues important to LGBTQ folk have themselves become more mainstream, and as prevailing attitudes have changed—as the binary of closeted and out has ceased in many ways to be the dominant means of imagining gay and lesbian existence—Bechdel’s work has found new audiences. One might even suggest that DTWOF itself played something of a role in these cultural shifts. In 2008 a substantial collection, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, was published with the subtitle The Lives, Loves, and Politics of Cult-Fave Characters Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and Others. By 2018, the New York Times had named The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For one of the fifteen most important books by a woman in the twenty-first century (Garner, Sehgal, and Szalai).

Fun Home and Are You My Mother?: Comics, Coming Out, and Self/Knowledge

It is Fun Home, published in 2006, that has garnered Bechdel international accolades. This memoir of Bechdel’s coming out and her father’s suicide has been honored as Time magazine’s Book of the Year and won an Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work. It was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the best books of the year by sources ranging from the New York Times to Entertainment Weekly, and it is regularly assigned (and sometimes banned) on college campuses as a first-year common reading, including at West Point. The recognition of Fun Home has brought Bechdel more mainstream success, as well as greater attention from academics and acknowledgment of the significance of her work from mental health experts and LGBTQ activists. Fun Home has been adapted into a musical, first off-Broadway in 2013 and then for Broadway in 2015, where it won numerous Tony Awards: Best Musical, Best Actor, Best Score, Best Book, and Best Direction. Notably, Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron, the team who brought Fun Home to the stage, are the first all-women team to win a Tony for Best Score. Bechdel was named an artist-in-residence at the University of Chicago in 2012 and received a MacArthur genius grant in 2014.

Much of the work on this groundbreaking book began during the run of DTWOF. While the memoir is more explicitly in the mode of what is recognizably life writing or autography, to use Gillian Whitlock’s term,⁶ the continuum of interests in selves and the nature of the subject—queer and lesbian identity and sexuality, gender performativity, the nature of embodiedness and relationality, and shared or troubled epistemologies and subjectivities—extends from DTWOF through Fun Home and Are You My Mother? In Fun Home, Bechdel sought to enter into the selves of her father as well as her own subjectivity. This process took a uniquely bodily and multimodal form: Bechdel posed herself as every subject and took photographs for every panel in the book, drawing from the digital images.⁷ Over seven chapters, each opening with a re-creation in black-and-white cross-hatching of a family photograph and each drawing on an intertextual relationship with books and authors most appreciated by Bruce Bechdel (especially James Joyce and Marcel Proust), Fun Home moves recursively through nonlinear temporality across multiple versions of Alison Bechdel.⁸ Bechdel the artist appears in its pages, merged with her character-self and narrator-self, via the drawing of a hand holding the drawing of a photograph: the notorious and compelling centerfold image of her babysitter Roy, presumed to be an object of erotic attention by her father (FH, 100–101). Bechdel as the character Alison appears as a child, a college student, a teenager, a child again. And Bechdel as the narrator appears in text boxes and gutters, drawing our attention to the spaces between past and present perceptions and subjectivity, between what is said and unsaid, between what is real and what is remembered.⁹

Fun Home takes as its subject not only the death of Bechdel’s father. Central to the narrative is her development as an artist and her defining of herself as a lesbian, processes that unfold as inextricably linked. In chapter 3, That Old Catastrophe, the character Alison is depicted at her typewriter in a panel using an over-the-shoulder view. We cannot see the words on the sheet of paper, but a text box with an arrow pointing to the paper and lettering drawn to look typewritten fill us in: I am a lesbian.¹⁰ The text in the gutter, providing telling by the Alison narrator, fills in a further gap, one of temporality as well as knowledge: Only four months earlier, I had made an announcement to my parents (FH, 58). The image is repeated, fragmented this time, in the final chapter, The Antihero’s Journey. In a much smaller panel, juxtaposed with another smaller panel so that the two together take up the same amount of space as two other panels in the tier they share in the middle of the page, a close-up on the n key of the typewriter completes the this time partially viewed sentence on the paper itself unmediated by arrow and text box: I am a lesbia […]. The panel underneath, depicting Alison’s hands putting the letter to her parents in the mailbox, shows the completion of the moment and the act of coming out to the family (FH, 210). In the earlier iteration, the words narrated tell us the significance of the typewritten sentence, and the image of the typewriting is in fact a flashback, conjured by the narrated words. In the second iteration, no words are necessary. We already understand the significance of the moment as we re-see it, the image repeated and the moment replayed and drawn out by the infinitely suspended n over the page, until the silence is broken, the n comes down, and who Alison is is defined irretrievably. Here we have the moment in time, the single object of the key invested with the power to speak, the utterance of lesbian, and the drawing of this very instant. But we also have the repetition of crisis, played out again and again in an attempt to interpret, to make meaning. The bringing together of each element in the panel, the page, and the whole of the memoir suggests how essential the defining of the subject, the development of the artist, and the cycles of troubles and traumas generated by epistemological crisis are to Bechdel’s work.

It is the trouble and trauma of not knowing that lies at the heart of Fun Home. The knowledge that she is a lesbian comes early in the narrative, and the process of what it means to know this and live this knowledge is part of the story. However, it is the not knowing of her father, the not knowing the truth of his death, that is the challenge presented for Bechdel. It is the pretending to not know the thing they all know—Bruce Bechdel’s queerness—that is the challenge presented for the family and is integral to how Fun Home unfolds (or unfolds and refolds). Bechdel’s privileging of the epistemological questions raised by intimacy, by sexuality, of being closeted and coming out, is what makes Fun Home so groundbreaking, as memoir, as comics, and as coming-out story.¹¹

An earlier, more ironized version of Bechdel’s coming out may be found in Coming Out Story, first published in a special solely Bechdel-authored-and-drawn issue of Gay Comics (#19, 1993).¹² This issue features a few explicitly life-writing-oriented pieces, like The Power of Prayer and True Confession; it also includes installments of the comic strip Servants to the Cause, a short-lived serial focusing on a group of gays and lesbians working at a periodical reminiscent of the Advocate, which is in fact where the strip originally appeared from 1988 to 1990. Coming Out Story has a bit of fun with the genre of the coming-out narrative through the artist’s signature self-referentiality and metaleptic storytelling practice (as evidenced by the title). This piece, in the form it takes as collected in The Indelible Alison Bechdel, also offers up Bechdel’s annotations on the origin of the story and the process of drawing it, generating a further metaleptic layer. In addition, however, the annotations reveal the challenges presented by the very form of the coming-out story and the constraints it places on knowing the self and inner life.

In the piece for Gay Comics, the cartoonist draws on touchstones we find in Fun Home: the devouring of books of LGBTQ interest, the shaping and making visible of the lesbian subject through reading and drawing, the discovery of campus community and the first encounter with a lover. In Fun Home, the coming out emplotment jostles against the portrait of the artist as a young person, or Künstlerroman, emplotment, until these multiple selves and stories coalesce. Multiple versions of the self, and multiple commentaries on those selves, suggest that Bechdel is not entirely comfortable with the confines of the conventional coming-out narrative. In one annotation, she writes, Sometimes I regret having written this piece [Coming Out Story] because it’s had the effect of ‘freezing’ the story for me. Now when someone asks me how I came out, I feel like I’m quoting myself (Indelible, 35). In a sense, in Fun Home, Bechdel is taking up the challenge of quoting herself, transcending that past self, by challenging the form of the coming-out story to contain multiple selves, not just the one that is frozen in that moment of emerging self-knowledge.

Through the creation of metaleptic narrative layers and commentary alongside stories of self-discovery and the work of the intimate personal archive, Bechdel reimagines what autography—what memoir as and in comics—can do. In Are You My Mother?, once again Bechdel has composed a text that is recursive and allusive. Even more so than Fun Home, this second memoir is entirely resistant to emotional and narrative closure. Helen Bechdel, who died in 2013, shortly after the publication of Are You My Mother?, had a fraught relationship with her artist daughter. In the memoir, Bechdel represents her mother as being proud of the work while never wanting to discuss its particulars, and struggling with the ongoing acts of self-disclosure that drive Bechdel’s art. While Fun Home concludes with an image of the child Alison leaping into the arms of her father, the final image of Are You My Mother? shows the child Alison crawling away from her mother. The image is presented in a single four-by-six-inch panel spanning two pages, a god’s-eye-view perspective on the two, framed all around with a wide border of the deepest black.

Are You My Mother? takes self-knowledge, the journey into the self via memory and dreams, as its central concern. Embedded within the narrative of attempting to come to terms with Helen and the past via extensive therapy and psychoanalysis, lensed through the theories of D. W. Winnicott and the writings of Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich, is the story of trying to create Fun Home. Thus in one memoir does Bechdel tell the story of the creation of another memoir, which was itself the story of the creation of herself as an artist and her understanding of herself as an out lesbian. Furthermore, she uses the delving into one version of herself in one memoir to account for the telling of another version of herself in another memoir. The stories within stories, the labyrinthine recursivity of each text, and the two together reveal that any simple attempt to explain Bechdel’s texts as reparative, as having the effect of healing the trauma of loss and shame through storytelling, must in fact fall a little short. The cartoonist returns again and again to the work of finding new ways to envision relationality, intimacy, interdependence, and the inner life, as well as the forces that isolate subjects from others.

As in Fun Home, literary allusiveness and intertextuality, and representations of textuality and reading—the hand-drawn re-creation of text as image, the portrayals of authors, the Alison character depicted in libraries and bookstores—hold a great deal of significance. Unlike the earlier book, however, what is privileged is a reading through the mother, as Tammy Clewell has observed (63). Bechdel engages with Woolf and Rich, rather than Proust and Joyce. The family stories told in Fun Home and Are You My Mother? move away from the lesbian community and kinship of Dykes to Watch Out For and travel inward, focusing on going back through multiple selves to construct a sense-making story that can never fully make sense of people who can never fully be known. Yet the earlier work of DTWOF, of a piece with the more recent memoirs, reveals an interest in finding the people and the spaces that allow us to make sense of ourselves in relationship with others, and is itself an archive of that search.

The challenges of self-disclosure and connection continue to concern Bechdel, even to challenge the artist herself. As of this writing, Bechdel’s promised new work, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, has been delayed several years. What was meant to be a memoir of Bechdel’s involvement with fitness culture has, in the artist’s words, turned into a meditation on mortality. In one interview she says, It’s about what it’s like to live in an ageing body, knowing you’re going to die (Cooke). One might suggest that as her own self enters a new phase of life—older, left without the parents who had such a shaping influence on her identity and her narrative arc—Bechdel is looking for new ways to tell her story. In the same interview, she says, I’m only able to write about myself. But it is becoming increasingly vivid to me that we must live in connection with other people (Cooke). I think this survey of her work has shown that this has in fact perhaps been vivid